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.