Icon guide available

We have prepared a guide for those of you who have been wanting more information on what the icons in the contest booklet mean. You can get one by clicking here or going to our website and clicking on the contest button.

Story from Community Coverage entry

Two questions from a contest rookie popped up today:

A few questions from a contest newbie!

Let's say I want to enter two issues from May in the Best Community Coverage category, but there's a story in one of the issues that's part of a series I wanted to enter for the Investigative Reporting category. Can I enter the entire issue and use the story for a different category, too, or do I have to choose one over the other? Is it the same for all of the categories requiring entire issues?

Secondly, when creating cropped clips for submitting individual stories, do I have to remove photos that accompanied the story so that the clips are text only?

Thanks for the help.

Welcome to the contest, newbie! On the first question, you may enter the story in the Investigative Reporting category even it is included in the issue of the paper you want to submit in Best Community Coverage. The Community Coverage category is concerned with entire editions involving all aspects of local coverage, not with specific stories. What you can't do is enter a story into two writing categories (such as investigative reporting and general news reporting).

It is not necessary to crop out the photos, headlines or graphics when we require cropped clips.

Good luck!

File size restriction

We have been informed by the folks at the Better Newspaper Contest website that they have established a new maximum file size for uploads.

Files may not exceed 5 MB each.

We got this message from BNC:

As you may know BetterBNC experienced a system slowdown, and eventual stoppage, on Monday, September 26. We determined the cause to be a high number of very large files being uploaded across several contests with imminent entry deadlines.
Files of extreme size already uploaded as entry attachments have been accepted, however future entry attachments may not exceed 5mb per individual file uploaded.

Remember that your entries will be viewed on a computer screen that's generally set to 72 dpi. Consequently having files with higher resolution isn't going to make it appear on screen any better than 72 dpi. By submitting files with the lower resolution you can save a ton of space.

Multimedia upload issue

We got this question from Anonymous:

I am having some trouble with the multmedia entries. There is no option to upload our .pdf and the print package is part of our entry. Is anyone else having this problem?

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It turns out the category was missing a couple of options on the contest system. That has since been corrected and you should be good to go.

2011 CONTEST UNDER WAY!!!

Yes, the blog is officially back in business. Rules and instructions were sent out to newspapers via email this week. If you did not receive them, use the links to the right or go to our main website, www.ncpress.com.

If you have questions or comments please use the commenting feature to send them to the blog. Comments are moderated, so they will not appear immediately. We'll get an answer to your comment as soon as possible.

Be sure to check in frequently to see what questions are popping up about this year's News, Editorial & Photojournalism Contest.

And good luck to everyone!

Label, label, label

Remember that old commercial for Libby's? "When it says Libby's, Libby's, Libby's on the label, label, label." OK, well that is an old one.

Anyway, we received this question...

When entering entries into the Better Newspaper Contest site, the label page says "This Page is Your Official Entry Form. Print and Submit this label with payment."


Do we print out one of those for every entry including online? Or do we just submit the Manage Entries list for online entries?

I understand how the labels work for mailed-in entries, but that label form is so bossy and insistent that I'm afraid I need to send one for every online entry too.

The only labels you need to print for the contest is for mailed-in entries. You certainly could print out the others for your own records, but it's not necessary.
 
The Manage Entries list is what is required to be sent with your payment. Don't be intimidated by the "bossy and insistent" form. It's only a computer, after all.

Slow to upload

Q: We're having trouble uploading. We go through the steps, it starts uploading and then stops midway. Any tips?

A: Here's a few we might offer that are good for anything you might want to upload to any site:

1. Check your file size. The smaller the size the faster and more reliable the transfer. Get the file size of your PDFs down. The quickest way to do that is printing it to Adobe Distiller.

2. Find out the peak load time for your newspaper's computer network. If everyone in your building is bogging down the network at a particular time of day, avoid uploading files during that time. You might be amazed at how many other departments in your newspaper are using the Internet and moving large files. It's not just the newsroom. One time period to be aware of is when the business office is printing up bills or sending financial files out. You might be surprised how much bandwidth and computing power they consume.

3. Check with your IT or computer people. They might have an idea for you about a good time during the day to send files.

4. Avoid heavy use times for the Internet, particularly around the 9-ish hour when people get to work, around lunch time and shortly before 5 p.m. Those seem to be prime time for workers to get on the Internet to check e-mail, watch videos...

Hope these tips help.