Judged
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007A fun weekend judging the Magazine Design and Journalism Awards. I said that I’d do it without asking what was involved, which wasn’t a very smart move. Turned out it meant choosing a winner, second and third in eight categories.
Someone else, God bless ‘em, had done the hard work of cutting them down to manageable proportions, but it still meant an awful lot of reading.
I have an advantage in that I’m not biased towards one particular company, and though it would be tempting to dismiss those who don’t train with us, I manage to avoid temptation.
My only bias is against those who are too lazy to print the stuff out, and instead just copy their entries on to a disk. That means I’ve got to do it for them.
What made this extra-irksome was that I’ve also been organising the Angling Writers’ Association entries. And, guess what? Half of them sent in disks or emailed their entries, meaning that once again, I had to print them out and photocopy them for the judges. Right, new rules for next year: hard copy only.
Some years ago, I covered the Schneider Trophy, a classic air race that works on very precise handicaps. The judge who set the handicaps said: “Before it starts, you’ve got 40 people who want to be your friend. Afterwards, just one.”
Judging awards is a bit like that. But not all judging, shock horror, is fair. I remember doing Emap’s awards and one of the other judges, editor of a women’s magazine, pushed all the fishing and bike titles to one side saying: “Well, they can’t win because I don’t understand them.”
So I pushed all the women’s titles on the floor and said: “Well, they can’t win either because I don’t understand them.”
She still doesn’t speak to me.