By TOBY CARRIG
APSE Third Vice President
Sports Editor, Antelope Valley Press

Story posted on May 13, 2009

Toby Carrig

Advice for future Third VPs: Watch out about those job changes in the middle of your term. It can keep you busy.

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Item 2: Greg Brownell passed along a great idea for small papers who can make the trip to the summer convention in Pittsburgh. If you bring along samples of your fine work, we can do a newspaper exchange there.

Sign up by contacting me (tcarrig@avpress.com) or Greg Brownell (brownell@poststar.com).

Once we get a number of participants, we will ask the editors to bring at least one copy to share with each participant – ideally an edition that highlights coverage of a big event or an interesting idea. In return, you will get one copy of the participating papers at the small-paper caucus.

Among other reasons, it can be helpful to get feedback or see how the paper stands in terms of contest entries.

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That's the segue to this month's main item: Contest judging.

For the second time in my judging career, I was able to check out papers in my own circulation category to find ideas and new ways of doing things.

This time, it came at a good time for me as I was preparing to take the sports editor job at the Antelope Valley Press in California.

Each time I judge the contest, I like to see how the judging plays out – what papers we agree upon and what ones we don't. The process is very deliberative to reach a consensus on our list. Some papers I really liked didn't make the top 20, and further scrutiny by the group on papers we may not have agreed on brought new arguments for inclusion.

Is there a winning formula among those papers that made the top 20 in the under-40,000 daily category? If there is, it is the ability to have produced at least one solid mandatory – the day after Thanksgiving was a rough draw for some – and having optionals that show: 1, a wide range of coverage to reflect the community; 2, some work on enterprise that goes beyond game coverage; and 3, the ability to meet the challenge of big-event coverage (which can range from the Lawrence Journal-World's coverage of a BCS bowl game and NCAA championship to Sauk Valley Newspapers' coverage of a youth softball World Series thousands of miles away and writing the story of a high school wrestler arrested for steroid possession).

I have compiled our committee's critiques – as promised – for all 70-plus entries. I will be going through the APSE directory and sending to the contacts for each paper. If there has been a change or an e-mail address is wrong, let me know.

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Some other observations from the contest:

■ Thank the photo staff

We emphasize content as well as the design, but I don't think we mention often enough the importance of the photography in producing first-rate sports sections. You can't have that cool design, that large impact photo from a state championship moment or that sharp three-page spread on an event without the photographers to carry it off.

■ "Needs more enterprise"

Seems like a popular judge's comment, but good enterprise leaves an impression: the Longmont (Colo.) Times-Call's work on the 100th anniversary of the "national" championship high school football team and the Altoona (Pa.) Mirror's countdown of the 20 most memorable shots in county basketball history are the kind of packages that emphasize a newspapers' institutional memory, while the Iowa City Press-Citizen's examination of the state of Iowa's athletic program was thorough and appealing.

■ Preseason previews

A few entries included – some to their benefit; others not – sections that had some type of high school sport preview material. The key to making that stand out is having a good feature or trend piece that can tie the package together more than a dozen stories with rosy outlooks.

■ Turkey Trot

It was interesting to observe the way a dozen or so papers approached that dreaded holiday community event, ranging from stand-alone photos to stories and agate.

■ Think about wire selection and play every day (including the day after Thanksgiving)

Readers – like judges – will wonder why the sports front has a story about someone 500 miles away or plays up an international tennis tournament that ended 35 hours before the paper hit their lawns.

■ If you didn't win, you didn't lose

There were some very good newspapers that did not make the top 20 listing, papers that probably resonate with their readership and do the job 365 days a year, so four days judged by strangers doesn't mean much in the grand scheme.

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Toby Carrig is the Sports Editor of the Antelope Valley Press. You can reach him at 1-800-879-1210 (ext. 211) or via e-mail at tcarrig@avpress.com.

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