How
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009The toughest awards to judge are always for newspaper, magazine or website of the year. Best reporter, feature writer, news story…it’s reasonably easy to set some basics on what raises an entry from also-ran to in the running. But the others? Much, much harder.
These musings are prompted by the postman staggering under the weight of judging for Press Gazette’s regional press awards. I had three classes to shortlist: young journalist, reporter and newspaper with under 20,000 circulation.
Getting the first two categories down to six finalists was fairly easy. Are there three strong entries? Off-diary stories or stuff passed on by a news editor? Has it landed in their laps, or required some digging? Amazing how short the list becomes with these simple filters.
Very few of those entering the young journo category offered anything more than news stories. Perhaps editors didn’t trust ‘em with features. And none put forward any just-for-web stories. Smell the roses, editors.
I hold less store on the actual writing at this stage. You assume it’s going to be all right, and you can never tell how heavily it’s been subbed. My experience has always been that when you ask a writer, he or she always says: “The subs hardly touched it.”
Ask subs, and they’ll retort: “Well, it needed a load of work.” But then, good subbing is doing it so the writer never notices.
But that newspaper of the year is always much tougher. You look carefully through three issues but you know they’ve chosen the best ones. Sometimes, you have to take an editor’s statement as the major factor. But they would highlight the good bits, pass over the plunging circulation figures, wouldn’t they?
But this year, I had a master idea. They all claimed to be doing lots on the web – so I checked. Twice. It was a revelation.
Some were just pasting up stories from the paper and doing no rewriting to cater for a different audience. Some claimed to update daily, and hadn’t done so for four days. Some just did one story.
It made my job easy.
No names, but if your newspaper online is getting scooped by the local council’s website, you can leave your dinner suit or cocktail dress in the wardrobe this year.