The response to the call earlier this week for Mark of Excellence judges has been great! It would be great to have you on board as well, so please consider participating this year.
You can give of your journalism expertise and lend a sympathetic ear (for tone, of course!) beginning Feb. 1 to help judge the student journalism — print, television, radio and online — submitted for SPJ's annual MOE competition.
Your commitment by Dec. 31 will ensure your contact info is submitted (by me) by Jan. 6 to national SPJ for staff there to begin the process of assigning passwords to judges, as this contest is being judged online.
Judging runs Feb. 1 to Feb. 28, so you'll have plenty of time to enjoy the holidays and start on your New Year's resolutions before the judging begins.
Judges in Region 2 will be weighing entries from Region 9. Our region, Region 2 (Maryland, D.C., Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina), will have its entries judged in another region. Region 9 covers Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Most all categories have a large (student enrollment of 10,000 or more) and a small (under 10,000) subsection. Examples of these categories: Newspaper Breaking News Reporting, Newspaper General News Reporting, Newspaper Sports Writing, Newspaper General Column Writing. The radio, television, online and magazine categories all compete against each other (i.e., no distinction between large and small). Some categories within the newspapers also have no distinction, such as editorial writing and sports column writing. Also being judged are photography, photo illustrations and editorial cartooning.
This is a great opportunity to get experience with online judging, if you haven't tried it yet. It's also a window on how well our journalism education programs are preparing students for the professional world.
You can contact me by email to let me know of your interest or to suggest others who may be interested in judging. Let me know if there are categories you think you might prefer to judge, as well. Some categories sampled had as few as 1 or 2 entries total, so you may be asked to judge several categories. The largest number (28) was submitted to Newspaper Sports Writing.
Here is a link to SPJ's page with all the details (including categories and submission guidelines) about the Mark of Excellence competition, in case you want to select preferred categories: http://www.spj.org/a-moe.asp
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and hope to hear from those of you I haven't heard from already BY DEC. 31.
Amy Fickling
SPJ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter
Treasurer
Region 2 MOE coordinator
email me at: xlntdragon@hotmail.com