By Melissa Davlin
The Best of 2016 Idaho Press Club awards awards opens next week. We’ve made some changes to the contest this year to keep up with the shifting media landscape.
First, we’ve changed the Print division to Publication, and the Magazine division to Periodical, allowing online-only outfits to compete with traditional newspapers and magazines. What does this mean? If you work at a newspaper and you’ve always entered in the Print division, nothing has changed — except now there may be a bit more competition. If you’re at an online-only outfit, you now have even more categories in which to compete.
We’ll still have the Daily and Weekly breakdowns. If you’re online-only and regularly publish stories four or more times a week, enter in the Daily division. If you publish less frequently, opt for Weekly or Periodical.
Another change: In the All Media division, we’ve added Photographer of the Year for both broadcast and publications.
Finally, we’ve made it easier to enter multimedia packages online. We understand that some features have multimedia components — interactive graphs or embedded videos — that aren’t properly translated in ISSUU.com or PDF submissions. We now allow the option of submitting a URL link in the comments. If your site is behind a paywall, it’s your responsibility to provide a verified log-in and password to judges. If your entry doesn’t have multimedia components and is just text, we still encourage entrants to use PDFs or ISSUU.com for ease of judging.
The deadline for entering is Monday, Jan. 23. The cost to enter will remain the same as last year: $20 per entry for Idaho Press Club members, $15 for student members, $45 per entry for non-members and $30 for non-member students. If you’re not already a member, join at idahopressclub.org/join to save money on your entries.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at 208-410-7239 or melissadavlin@gmail.com.
Melissa Davlin is a reporter, host and producer for Idaho Public Television, and co-hosts “Idaho Reports.” A member of the Idaho Press Club state board, she is this year’s contest chair.
