WINNERS

posted by James Reel

    Jimmy Boegle, esteemed editor of the Tucson Weekly, offers this response to my rant against journalism competitions:

    I agree with most of the points you make in your anti-journalism-contest blog screed. I also agreed with most of it when it was in Media Watch long ago.
    You’re right that most readers don’t care about them. You’re right that in some categories, there are very few entries. (Look at the award I personally picked up in the Arizona Press Club contest: a third place for education writing! In the medium-newspaper category! Out of nine entries! Whoo-hoo—I barely made the top third!) You’re right that some publications enter a lot of stuff just to see what catches a judge's eye, which confirms yet another of your points, that the judging can often times be, well, insane or ignorant (my exact words, not yours).
    Despite my agreements with these points, however, I still have the Weekly submitting healthy amounts of entries for the contests that make sense for us. I’ve even been known to publicly chastise rogue arts editors for not helping me decide what to enter.
    Here are three reasons why:
    1. It’s part of the game you have to play in the journalism world. When I was in Las Vegas, I worked for a newspaper that employed one of the best photographers in the state. He felt much like you do about contests, and didn’t enter any of his pics one year for the Nevada Press Association contest. Well, our biggest competitor’s photogs did—and they ended up winning a bunch of awards, largely because only, like, four newspapers were in our circulation category. Then they made a major public deal about their awards haul. This pissed off our photographer. He entered the next year, and he got the awards he deserved—meaning, just as importantly, our competitor did not.
    2. Interesting trends can emerge that expose a sliver of truth. You illustrated this well by pointing out how few writing awards the Star won in the AP contest. Not to toot the Weekly’s horn … OK, I lie, to PRECISELY toot our horn, I think it says something that every year, our small-staffed, under-budgeted newspaper wins awards against the big boys in the state in the Arizona Press Club. Of the 18 awards we won this year, 10 of them—including five first-place honors—were in all-publications categories. By winning all-publications first-place awards in film criticism, music criticism and arts criticism, it shows the strength of the back of our book. Margaret Regan’s four first-place awards (two in all-publications categories), in the context of her always winning awards like this, offer proof of her talent. (The same can be said for Danehy, Banks, Nintzel, etc.)
    3. These awards give our writers much-appreciated and well-deserved kudos. This reason is, by far, the biggest reason why I take the time to enter our writers in these awards. Journalists tend to be an overworked and underpaid lot, and I KNOW that, for example, these Arizona Press Club awards truly meant something to most of the winners. That means a lot to me.
    So, that’s my two (maybe even three) cents. And that’s why I’ll keep entering these contests on behalf of the Weekly.