Do awards matter?

You could work at my old paper, which is just above Podunk where the ME is proud of awards and hiring copy editors with graduate degrees, including one with a PhD. No matter how many awards or accolades a staff has, mistakes such as "pubic school" still slip through, which kills any credibility awards bring.

 

When they stopped giving us a little bump in our paycheck for the awards, I stopped entering them.

 

Awards are subjective, of course.

Of course, so are hiring decisions.

Yes, awards matter, and, given a choice between having them, or not having them, it is definitely better to have them.

 

Since I've only worked at one shop my whole career, listing awards does keep me from being able to write out my resume on a post-it note. That's a plus.

 

Depends on the person doing the hiring. Some value awards, some don't.

 

I just throw some things together and submit it. It's always nice to get a pat on the back, but unless you are a bad writer or photographer, you should be able to pull together three or four good stories or photos a year. The contest is subjective and doesn't take into account consistent quality of a newspaper.

Last year our sports department won nothing and the paper south of us won four state awards. The border schools we both cover prefer us for our consistency in coverage. And schools we don't cover that are 10-15 miles away and covered by the paper to the south are asking us to cover them.

To me that, along with all the compliments I get from folks in the community are more valuable.

 

I come at this from a slightly different angle now, as a manager who wants to see "my" people recognized for good work.

I take the contest-entry process very seriously. But what I take seriously about isn't so much getting the right entries as it is getting a little ironic distance from a year's work to focus on what we did well and where we need to improve.

I find that reviewing that work is a very positive experience.

Once you put it in the hands of judges ... ehh. You never know.

My plaques and such are in a box someplace. In my old apartment I had some of them on the wall ... behind a door. As good a spot as any.

 

Henry makes a good point...it is valuable to look back on the past year and find changes you liked and things that could improve. That led to an overhaul of my section about a year ago, and I've been very pleased with the results, plus, it's been much easier to get pages out with reduced staffing.

 

This is a good thing. It's the same process you go through when you are reviewing your work for clips. If you are content with where you are and haven't been applying for work, then reviewing your work for awards entries is a good way to look back and go over what you did well, what you didn't like, and maybe process through memory what factors led to to the work you like or didn't like.

That part is useful. It's probably worth taking the time to do the entries justice, not because you are trying so hard to win, but because you're giving yourself a critical review of a year's work.

 

Hopefully you at least got some orange slices.

 

Same for me. I was the only sports guy there, so all of the sports categories were incumbent on me. The stuff I reviewed in the morning was good, but when you've been sequestered in a room since 8 a.m. doing nothing but reading, you get tired and ready to go home. I always had two piles: Maybe and no chance. I'd read through the maybes and go from there. But by the end of the day, there were several categories when the discard pile was the only pile. Ouch.

 

I got a plaque from the Make-a-Wish Foundation a few years ago and it's the only one I display or care about.