Nevada Press Association The best in Nevada journalism since 1924
Nevada’s premier journalism contest has normally been called the Better Newspaper Contest, even though news websites and magazines joined the competition several years ago. The Nevada Press Association Awards Committee recently rectified that anomaly by renaming the contest the Awards of Excellence.
The committee also made a made a few other, mostly modest changes to the 2020 competition.
Its most significant adjustment was to reduce and redefine the circulation groups that formerly shaped the competition in each category — i.e., Urban Daily, Urban Weeklies, Intermediate, Community and Magazines. To help ensure a critical mass of entries in each category, those classifications were retired in favor of two broad groupings — Urban and Rural. News organizations serving the Las Vegas and Reno metro areas will compete in Urban and everyone else will face off in the Rural category. Nevertheless, there are still a few print-based categories reserved exclusively for newspapers and a few others where it continues to make sense to host a separate competition for magazines.
The committee also decided to eliminate several formerly “digital-only” categories in favor of more platform-agnostic competition combining print and digital. Digital Breaking News Story, Digital News Feature Story, Digital Sports Story, Digital Business News and Digital Entertainment or Feature Story, have each been folded into their “print” corollaries. Platform Writing was also eliminated as a category.
Click here to see a more detailed list of rules and this year’s contest categories.
NPA will also be enforcing a new rule requiring photos, graphics and ads to be submitted in context, either as a PDF or web link of the page on which they were published. Freestanding graphic files, which are difficult to judge and impossible to authenticate, will no longer be accepted.
Most of the other changes — for instance, Illustrated Photo will henceforth be known as Photo Illustration, and overlap between the Outstanding Visual Journalist and Outstanding Graphic Designer categories has been eliminated — will likely go unnoticed by all but the most eagle-eyed contestants.
The period of competition for this year’s contest is April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020. With a couple of minor exceptions, material submitted as part of an entry must have been published during that period.
The contest website will be ready to accept entries on April 17. A formal call for entries with a list of categories and an entry tally sheet will be emailed to members around the same time.
The entry fee is $9 per entry received by May 22, and $10 per entry received after May 22, but before the contest deadline on May 29.
Members of the Utah Press Association will serve as judges for this year’s contest.