VANA is promoting what appears to be a series of News Corp. newsagent promotion event. I think associations need to be associations and not marketing arms for newspaper publishers. Also, this latest marketing from VANA indicates a visual disconnect from the national association, ALNA, with a very different looking logo.
VANA did-affiliated from ALNA last year
Interesting. So they ditched ALNA (the ANF) in favour of supporting News Corp maybe?
Melbourne is well served with meetings. I wonder if there are any newsagents outside the metro area in Victoria.
To say that VANA is in the pockets of NewsCorp is unfair. While VANA is far from perfect, they have been far more active than ALNA in trying to achieve a fair outcome for newsagents with NewsCorp and the other publishers.
I think the dis-affiliation was due to reasons including ANF merging with LAAV to form ALNA, when LAAV were competitors to VANA, without consulting VANA; ALNA’s Hubbed competing with VANA’s NParcel (VANA never endorsed Hubbed in fact they saw it as another Bill Express); and VANA being far more progressive than ALNA in trying to achieve outcomes for its members.
When T2020 was a done deal with ALNA laying down and accepting it, it was VANA lobbying and liaising with its members (and ALNA eventually piggybacking off this) which tried to get a better outcome for newsagents
If VANA is more proactive than ALNA maybe they can expand australia wide and change their name to ANF.