"There's often an attitude that awards are meaningless and what really counts are the ratings," added Reid Johnson, Director of News, WCCO-TV, Minneapolis.
He believed that kind of attitude wouldn't inspire people to be proud of their best work, and in fact, there were many people in a television news department whose efforts were not graded by the ratings.
"Ratings don't rise and fall on whether or not a reporter does a good job, or on whether a photographer has gone the extra measure to shoot a piece well," Johnson argued.
It is important that management of a station recognize awards for what they really are --- a salute to people's best work," he stressed.

There's another benefit, too. There's a certain amount of credibility that goes along with winning a big prize.
"Despite the fact the judging is often very subjective, people still look at the cumulative effect of awards as an additional measure of the quality of the station," Kinard added.

1985 was a big, big news year for New Orleans," said former WWL News Director Jim Boyer.
They had four hurricanes, a Tulane basketball scandal,  a Governor Edwards indictment, and a Russian who jumped off a freighter.
"We did a very good job covering them, and we felt if the station was ever going to win the Murrow award, 1985 was the year," he said.
Boyer took his 11 p.m. producer off of show producing in December (many contest deadlines were in January) and put him in charge of awards presentations for RTNDA, AP, UPI Louisiana, duPont, Peabody, and others.
"We had won the RTNDA regional award the previous year and WCVB, Boston, won the national award," said Boyer.
They played WCVB's entry at the convention and it was highly produced.
He called RTNDA and asked them to send the specifications of the awards --- what could be in it and what couldn't.     "It turned out there really weren't any ground rules," he said.

Boyer got a copy of WCVB's entry to see what won the award, and he set about producing a slick, high quality entry for WWL.
The station's 11 p.m. producer and the promotion director got together and wrote a script explaining what WWL had done for the year. The person who did their news promotional spots --- an announcer with a good, authoritative voice --- cut the audio track.

"Then, we edited in the various elements and put together what amounted to a 30-minute commercial for WWL-TV News and what we had done that year," Boyer said.
Boyer felt awards were based 50 percent on what you'd done and 50 percent on how you assembled the presentation.
"You can't do inferior work and put together a great entry and win an award based on inferior work," he said. He believed you' had  to start with a very good product.
But, a lot of very good products don't win an award because the entry wasn't put together well, he warned.
"I don't want to put down the journalistic job we did, because we did an extraordinary job of journalism.  This entry very accurately and attractively got across the message of exactly what we did do,"  he ssaid
"Not only did we do a good job in covering the news, but we did an excellent job in telling the judges how well we covered the news," he added.
On that entry, they spent about 500 staff hours, but it paid off.
"We won an award which the station richly deserved," he said.

"Unfortunately, it's becoming more important for the major awards, such as RTNDA, DuPont, or Peabody," said WCCO's Johnson.
"We are in the communications business and they expect you to do a good job of communicating your work," he explained.

Kinard said the RTNDA had raised this issue with the judges and had said they should take it into consideration.
"We don't tell the judges how to judge. However, we have raised the awareness issue with them," he said.

Is a highly produced award entry, from a station that has the horsepower to do it, worth more than a station that just gives you a potpourri of material that has been on the air and doesn't organize it so slickly?
"I think that's a legitimate question that needs to be asked," he said.

While Kinard had some serious concerns about over-producing an award entry and making it look too produced, he believed production could serve a good purpose.
"There is an economy in the judge's time if you can show him your best work as efficiently as possible," he explained.
"Sometimes you can fill some gaps by having it produced, explaining what happened next in the story and then showing what the station did next," he said.
"In that way, the judge has a sense of what you did and can understand the full trail of the story. For that, production is useful and it is appropriate," he added.

KSL and WCCO both had people assigned to keep track of the various awards and the deadlines.
At KSL, it was the Special Projects producer who rounded up the entries.
At WCCO, Assistant Public Affairs Director Nancy Mate  functioned as the Awards Coordinator.

"The criteria for the various awards are often very, very detailed, and every entry is different. There's no way to mass produce them,"  said Mate.

Over the years, Mate developed a calendar of when the entries were due. For example, in January,  these contests had deadlines: RTNDA, SDX, Peabody, American Film Festival, AP, UPI, AWRT, Scripps Howard, IRE, Monitor and Robert F. Kennedy.
"The thing that's kept us in good shape is trying to systematize as much as possible," she explained.
When the documentary unit or I-Team did a good story or a major piece, she asked them to write up a one-page description of it as soon as it aired. That way, important details were not forgotten and the information could be quickly re-written for the entry.

WCCO's Johnson felt  it was important to take the time to work with your staff in producing award entries.
"Every newsroom is strapped for time. You feel like you've done the best job you can in a day if you can get your newscast on the air.  But it really doesn't take as much time as you think," he said.
Mate notified everyone when the award deadlines were coming up and around the holidays, staffers took an evening or a weekend morning to get together and look back on their work.

Johnson said the key was keeping awards in mind throughout the year.
"It's not any secret that most award tapes are stories you did in November and December, because that's as far back as you can remember.   It's helpful to encourage a producer who produced a very successful newscast to put it aside, or a reporter to put a particular piece aside," he added.

Boyer said, "I believe the entry is very important.  I've judged contests and the ones that look like they are organized and look like they took some care in putting the reel together, you've got to figure they have their journalistic act together too."

Here were some of their suggestions:

1. Label the tape, as well as the box.

2. Start at the very head of the tape and put on 30 seconds of color bars.
"That way, whoever pops the tape in knows there is something on it," said Boyer.

3. Then, go to a countdown.
"It was very easy for a judge to cue up our tape and not have to struggle finding our material or figuring out what point we were trying to make," he said.

4. Use new tape stock.
"We used new tape instead of a tape which had been used 30 or 40 times and we knew we weren't going to have banding problems or dropout problems," Boyer said.
"Make your entry look new. It's a commercial. You're selling your product.    Your product is what you put on the air, so you package it in the most attractive way you can. That is pure common sense," he said.

5. Send a cover letter.
"A good, but brief, cover page for each award entry is important to explain why we are entering this particular award, what the story is and how it applies to this category," said Kinard.
"As a judge, I pick up a tape and it's got a name, call letters, a title of a story. I put it in the machine and I may have to spend several minutes figuring out what it's all about," he said.
Sometimes he  found the story didn't even belong in the category.
"Had there been a cover letter there to explain what the story was and why they thought it belonged in that category, I could have concentrated my time on the tape and looking at the elements of the story," he said.

6. Don't make the tape too long.
Make your entry sufficiently long, but as short as possible, so that the judge has the opportunity to see the best of the work and can make a fair judgment.
"You can't cut out all the bad parts and put in the good parts. On the other hand, don't give me three days of material either, because I'm just not going to get around to making an honest appraisal of it. I'll run out of time before I can do that," said Kinard.

7. Don't flood the competition with entries.
"Our staff judged one press club's awards and the tapes were almost in excess of 100," Johnson said.
"We were a little irritated the stations didn't pre-screen for us," he added. They saw four or five stories from one station in the same category.
"It's a strain on judges to go through four or five pieces in the same category, and we wish they would have picked one as their best effort," he said.

8. Involve as many of your people as you can.
Johnson felt a number of local or regional contests are good to enter because they're usually accompanied by a banquet where the best effort is shown.
"When it's a local occasion, you can have a lot of your people attend and get that sense of pride in the station and in their work," he said.

9. If you win a big one, let the community know about it.
"We've wrestled with it a number of times when we've won a major award.  How do you handle it?  Do you put it in your newscast?  Do a 30-second promotional announcement?," said Johnson.
"We've taken the position that if we've won a major award, we want the community to know about it because we want them to know the stations in their community are doing excellent work," he said.
"We try to say it in a way that we've all won. The community got to see the good work, and we got it recognized," he added.

Create A Culture For Award Winners
News Directors at stations that won awards in 2000 explained their newsrooms' approach to major stories and investigations.  
Here are the details from:   David Baer, WMTW-TV, Portland;   Jacques Natz, WTHR-TV, Indianapolis;  and Tom Sides of  KTVX-TV, Salt Lake City;

The duPont-Columbia Awards.

The Peabodys.

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