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?

'STRINGS' ATTACHED

posted by James Reel

    Saving me the effort of writing anything new as I recover from the two-week pledge drive, parts of the latest issue of Strings magazine are online, including two parts by me. No doubt you will be fascinated by my primer on sight reading (says my source, “Great sight-readers overlook the mistakes they make”). I also have an article about the Section Quartet, a string foursome established to play rock music on its own and with others. The quartet insists on calling itself a band. Call it whatever you want, after you’ve read the article.

VICTORY

posted by James Reel

    The pledge drive is finally over! The end comes a week late, but no dollars short: $51,429 is the initial tally, on a goal of $50,000. After two weeks of this, I feel like I've just been through fundraising boot camp, plus a tour of combat duty at the same time.

PUMPED

posted by James Reel

    Still immersed in the Fund-Raising Campaign That Will Not Die, still no time for original blogging, insofar as anything I do here is original. Merely a link to my latest piece in the Tucson Weekly:

    Hal Hundley's back in town. He's started a new musical theater company, and he's putting on a show this weekend.
    A show that, oddly enough, doesn't really reflect what Hundley intends to accomplish with his group.
    Roundabout Music Theatre is presenting Pump Boys and Dinettes, a country-music revue. "It's not typical of what I do," Hundley admits, "and it's a little difficult to put together, because it's mostly music, not much dialogue, and actors play the musical instruments instead of having a separate orchestra."
    Hundley is usually a traditional book-show kind of guy. He founded SALOC--the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company--in 1976, launched it with the musical 1776, and then went on to standard Rodgers and Hammerstein-style fare. That's the sort of thing Hundley intends Roundabout to present in the future, on a reduced scale, but for now, he wanted something that would appeal to both bikers and Woody Guthrie fans--he hopes to draw an audience from this weekend's Tucson Thunder biker gathering and the Tucson Folk Festival. The Sound of Music probably would not have been a good choice.

    Read the rest here.

INFORMED DECISIONS

posted by James Reel

    Terry Teachout thinks it’s a good idea to honor jazz figures with a Pulitzer Prize, but he says that, for a number of reasons, Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar did not deserve this year's award. He ponders, as do I, whether the broadening of Pulitzer eligibility will mean that judges will be making even less informed decisions than usual:

I also wonder how many judges likely to be tapped for future Pulitzer juries will be equally competent to weigh the relative merits of jazz and pop albums and written-out classical compositions. In a perfect world, all musicians would be as familiar with Duke Ellington as they were with Aaron Copland--and some of them are. In practice, though, it's comparatively uncommon for classical musicians to have extensive knowledge of jazz, or vice versa. Yehudi Wyner, the classical composer and Pulitzer laureate who chaired this year's jury, acknowledged this fact by recommending to the Pulitzer Board that separate prizes be given to classical and nonclassical music, which strikes me as a realistic response to an otherwise insoluble problem.

    Read his whole essay here.

ROSTROPOVICH

posted by James Reel

    Mstislav Rostropovich has died of intestinal cancer at age 80. I won’t bother linking to any articles, because they’re everywhere you look. But I will tell you of one person who, frankly, is not sorry to see Rostropovich go.
    My friend Jeff Joneikis, owner of the mail-order company Records International, used to run a label called Russian Disc. He and his business partner, pianist-conductor Constantine Orbelian, would license recordings from the Russian agencies that succeeded the old Soviet broadcasting system and distribute them, quite legally, in the United States. The Russian Disc catalog included a good two dozen Rostropovich discs.
    Well, Rostropovich got wind of this, then got a lawyer. He claimed that Russian Disc had pirated material to which he owned the rights, and which he supposedly intended to have released by EMI. Never mind that Russian Disc had formal contracts with the post-Soviet radio archives. Never mind that the tapes in Rostropovich’s possession were mono copies of the stereo masters Russian Disc had used. The nuisance lawsuit, unfounded as it was, drove the company into bankruptcy. Jeff suspects that the lawsuit may have had less to do with rights to the tapes than with bad blood between Rostropovich and Orbelian’s father, who had nothing to do with the label. Jeff has no evidence to support this notion, though.
    So now you know why there’s one man in America who sneers when he says, “Rostropovich, the great humanitarian.”