Questions, questions

A variety of questions have been pouring into Contest Central. Here are a few of them:

Q: In a full-section category such as Sports Coverage, if one of the selected day’s paper had related stories on 1A, can the 1A material be included?

A: No. Full-section categories judge only the sections involved, not material outside of the section.

Q: We have a quick press run, so by the time we discover a typo or something that needs corrected, it’s too late for the printed product. However, we are able to correct what we put online. Can we submit the stories as posted online instead of what was printed in the paper?

A: No. Entries must be as they appeared in print.

Q: Can two papers enter a story as a joint entry?

A: No. Only one paper may submit and receive the credit for the story.

Too many pages?

As some of you may have noticed already, there is a limit on the number of documents you can upload to the Better Newspaper Contest website. Jen writes to us…

I am trying to upload a story in the News Feature category that was written as a two-day series. There are a total of 6 pages that will need to be uploaded. I have two questions:
1) The site says that I've reached my upload limit at 3 pages, but the series has 6 pages.
2) Since this is a two-day series with a separate headline for each day, how do I submit it as a single entry?

Jen, good questions. For entries that have multiple pages, such as a series, you’ll want to combine the PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat. Someone at your newspaper is undoubtedly an expert using the software, so do take advantage of that resource. The steps are also included in the contest book.

As for the headline issue, with this being a series you could put one descriptive headline that covers the entire series (a preferable option) or type in several headlines separated by semi-colons (not preferred unless it’s for a column, editorial or criticism entry).

Hope this helps and thanks for the question.