Lending a hand with newspaper contest judging is always well worth the time

Later this week, some of us here at the News Journal will join colleagues from all over the state as the Kentucky Press Association presents its annual winter convention and awards banquet. We are hopeful to return home with at least a few first-place awards among us, but who determines which entries are winners and which aren’t?

Each year, the KPA partners with a press association from another state. In exchange for judging all of our entries, KPA members will in turn judge theirs. For the 2023 contest, folks from Wisconsin got to spend some time looking over contest submissions made by Kentucky news-papers. That means that people in Kentucky, including yours truly, got to judge similar submissions that were made in Wisconsin.

I have had the chance to do this in the past, and have always jumped at the opportunity for a couple of different reasons.

First, I like to help out. These contests require a lot of work to organize and present. Everyone likes to win an award, but people actually have to look over all of these submissions, and consider which ones are better in order to make that happen.

I appreciate the fact that someone takes the time to review my entries, so I am happy to volunteer to do the same in return.

Secondly, I enjoy lending a hand with judging other press associations’ newspaper contests be-cause it presents a great opportunity to learn about what methods other publications are using to find success in their respective communities.

Truthfully, when it comes to small town America, we are all very similar at the end of the day. What works in one community may not always work in another, but generally speaking, most small towns out there are facing similar dilemmas and harboring many of the same concerns each-and-every day. Because of that, local papers everywhere are having the same conversations about how to best cover local news and events.

In looking at newspaper coverage from another area, you may be able to get ideas about how to approach certain stories, what kinds of special coverage might work, or what topics would be worth the time to delve into.

This, in addition to getting all kinds of ideas from a stylistic standpoint, make volunteering your time as a contest judge well worth it, in my opinion.

Over the weekend, I got to look over some submissions in the sports photography category, as well as entries in business coverage and local columns. I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the photos and reading the stories, especially those that did a good job of describing issues and/or events that had taken place in a specific local community.

With so much going on in our day-to-day lives, it can be easy to forget that it’s a big world out there. Never mind the world… this country alone is massive, and there are millions of people living their lives in each day.

I fully believe that the absolute best way to learn about what’s happening in any of those peoples’ lives at any given time is to pick up the local newspaper wherever they happen to be living. That is, of course, assuming local journalism still exists where they live. That is no longer the reality for many out there, which is truly tragic for many different reasons, but I’ll leave that conversation for another time.

Thanks to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association for helping to make this year’s KPA awards banquet possible. It was a pleasure doing my part to make sure that the same can be said for you!