What’s new?

We made some small changes to our contest this year based on feedback from journalists and data about entries from prior years. These changes were made by a committee of SPJ Western Washington and SPJ Oregon board members in consultation with publications around our region.

Our hope is to better reflect the topics journalists in our region cover, make some categories more competitive and better serve audio and video journalists.

As a reminder, newsrooms of any predominant medium can submit to any section. For example, TV journalists don’t need to solely submit their work to the video section. If you have a piece with multiple elements, like a written article accompanied by an audio piece, then submitting it to the Writing section means judges will only judge the written article. If you submit it to the Audio section, then judges will only judge the audio piece. If you want the piece judged as a whole with all elements taken into consideration, the Multimedia category might be the best fit. 

Like last year, some topical categories will allow submissions of up to three written pieces as part of one story to allow reporters to include follow-up coverage, sidebars, etc.

A summary of this year’s changes is below:

• Added a new newsroom size designation for the writing section and the photo & design section. The new sizes are: Small 1-5 FTE, Medium 6-20, Large 21-45, and X-Large 46+.