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.

News enterprise vs. investigative

I always have trouble telling whether a story (or short series) involving a lot of legwork and records requests belongs in the investigative category or the enterprise category. Is there any clear cut way to tell the difference?

Remember the Supreme Court justice that famously said of pornography that he knew it when he saw it? Unfortunately the answer to your question may be closer to that than any clear cut definition.

While reasonable people may disagree on this topic, we'll give the question a shot. Both News Enterprise Reporting and Investigative Reporting involve beyond the normal level of journalism you'd do for a daily story.

We'd regard Investigative Reporting as being about uncovering a problem, illegal activity, pattern of abuse or something in that realm.

News Enterprise Reporting might involve the same level of work, but more in the way of trying to break down or explain some issue or trend. You're not trying to right a wrong, you're attempting to thoroughly illuminate an issue for your readers.

One big difference between the two involves the submission of a letter for  Investigative Reporting showing what impact the stories had on the community or how the reporting lead to a resolution of the problem. The description for Investigative Reporting states, "evidence of probable impact will weigh heavily in the judging."

Such a letter is not required or even encouraged for News Enterprise. Impact is not judged in News Enterprise. That's an important distinction.

All at once?

Should all entries from a contestant be entered at one time or does it matter? -- Paulette

One of the great things about this system is that up until the deadline you have full control of your entries. Upload a couple today and some more in a week or so. Decide against one of the entries you've already uploaded? Simply "disable" that entry. So the short answer to your question is that entries do not have to be all uploaded at the same time.

They just have to be uploaded or disabled before the deadline.

Stories from sections

Some person by the name of Anonymous left us this inquiry:

I have another question regarding special sections; are stories published in special sections eligible for submission in the feature writing category?

Well, Anon, yes. Here's why -- the special section category judges the entirety of a section, not the individual elements of the section. Consequently, stories, headlines, photos, etc. that run in the section may be entered separately.

One caveat though: In order to be eligible, the section must have been inserted as part of the newspaper. Material from stand-alone niche publications cannot be entered.

Thanks for the question and next time don't feel so anonymous.

Special section question

We received this inquiry from Ken at the Havelock News:

We put together a special magazine on our city's 50th anniversary. We were in charge of content. However, our Shopper was in charge of selling it. The cover of the magazine states that it is a product of the Havelock News and Shopper. Would this preclude it from being allowed to be entered into the special section category? Again, the news content is ours. The advertising is theirs.

It sounds like fair game for the Special Section category to us, as long as it was inserted in your newspaper and not just in the shopper.

What counts as a headline?

We received this question from Cathy concerning the headline category: Can overlines/photo kickers be entered as headlines?

Overlines, for the most part, should be considered one part of a total headline. So, while you wouldn’t enter an overline by itself, you could enter it with the primary headline. (This presumes we're both defining overlines as a small headline that appears above the main headline. Unfortunately newspaper terms many times are unique to particular newspapers and the same word can mean different things at different papers.)

Photo kickers (as in the headlines above a cutline) might be a bit more tricky to categorize. In a sense they are headlines, but not for what we consider a traditional story. In the end, this would really come down to what the specific person judging your category thinks about it. If it was me judging, I might not reject a photo kicker as a headline, but I’d probably not give it as much weight as a story headline. In the absence of a rule prohibiting it, you should be able to enter a photo kicker, but would you really want to take a chance? A simple piece of advice: I wouldn't.