UNCOMPETITIVE
posted by James Reel
Sunday, most newspapers in Arizona bragged about their achievements in this year’s Associated Press Managing Editors News Writing and Photo Contest. The Arizona Daily Star announced that it won eight first-place awards, among other honors.
It ought to be ashamed.
Why? Because only one of those first-place awards was for news writing: Becky Pallack’s “Dad slain after he confronts intruders.” All the others were for photos, page design and “online presentation.” In 1998, about a year before I quit, the Star began to focus on presentation over reporting, and as a result the paper has won very few first-place awards for writing in the past several years. Instead of being so proud of its photogs and designers, the management should be worried about the quality of its writing and reporting.
I dislike journalism contests for reasons I’ll explain a few paragraphs hence, but I must defend this APME competition from some typically boneheaded remarks posted by readers at the Star’s Web site. Blurts one respondent:
These um cough cough "awards" are a HUGE conflict of interest and I would add, entirely unethical. As the Star is a customer of the AP, a very valuable one considering the paper is more than half made up of wire stories from the AP. So this is like giving an award to one of your favorite, and most financially lucrative customers, what a joke.Says another, complaining about the preponderance of Arizona Republic winners:
I've been watching this contest over the years, and clearly, the Az Associated Press voting body is made up mostly of Az Repugnant staffers...OK, first of all, in most journalism competitions—and I’m assuming APME’s functions this way, too—judges are not drawn from the staffs of competing newspapers. For these Arizona awards, the judges were almost certainly from out-of-state. Second, this particular competition has nothing to do with the Associated Press. It’s conducted by an association of managing editors—the people who run individual newspapers—from papers taking the AP service. Yes, you have to be an AP paper in order to enter the contest, but the AP itself does not sponsor or judge the competition, and it’s laughable that getting one of these awards would be any sort of incentive to subscribe to AP services. (If this is a typical newspaper contest, there’s little if any financial remuneration for the winners.)
So why do I object to journalism contests? Here’s an explanation I supplied in 2004, when I was writing the Tucson Weekly’s Media Watch column:
Last week, the Star, Citizen and even the Tucson Weekly trumpeted the awards they won in the Arizona Press Club competition, as if anybody outside a newsroom really cares about such things. People inside newsrooms shouldn't put so much stock in contests, either.
The biggest problem is that there's usually only one judge per category, and the winners reflect that single judge's agenda, or lack of imagination.
Judges are recruited from out of state, which reduces conflicts of interest, but it's hard for someone at such a distance to know if the reporter has missed certain nuances of the story, failed to ask a key question or had an institutional memory lapse.
Then there's the question of how many stories are submitted. If there are only three entries in some category, that isn't much of a contest. Meanwhile, some publications flood the competition with entries, presumably to increase their chances of getting an award.
One reform might be to forget the judges; post all entries to a Web site and have members of the press association vote for the best. Groupthink is a danger, but the results would reflect the opinions of a large group of professionals (including reporters, not just editors with trendy agendas or, on the other hand, antediluvian notions).
Of course, papers with big staffs could concentrate their votes on their own submissions, which wouldn't be fair. Maybe we should just ditch contests altogether. Does anyone outside the journalism profession think they're important?
