Not Exactly The Pulitzers, But Still
I should have caught this before, actually. As reported here, many OC favorites have picked up prestigious honors from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Assocation.
Steve Baggs bags second place for cartooning, Peter Hockaday first place for best writing, and – drumroll, please – Aaron Shakra’s Pulse section first place for best section.
Congratulations, all. However – and there’s no polite way of saying this – now I really want to see this state’s best student cartoonist. Also, how badly do the other sections of other papers suck?
Five minutes browsing the Portland State Vanguard (winner in the “Overall Excellence” category) didn’t turn up anything particularly noteworthy, except for this line:
And the art! Oh, the art. If spring is a time for love, then the art is a reflection of that: the shows this month are aglow with trembling excitement of the new season. And as I find myself, wandering through the flowering trees, with the glimmer of spring dew in my eyes, I realized people still say the stupidest goddamn things.
Heh. Nice one.
Someone out there has seriously made a spam-bot promoting Generic Propecia? That is such Spew material! That’s classic, obviously all the readers of the OC Blog need Generic Propecia. Who reading a college magazine-blog wouldn’t?
The problem with ONPA judging is that for the general excellence category the judges pick the dates of publication you can submit. For the individual awards, the newspaper gets to choose. So if a paper were to take, say, 22 or so awards, that newspaper may still lose to a newspaper with, say, three awards because the judges thought the GE submissions were better. The individual awards don’t weight in the general excellence decision for some asinine reason.
Plus, ONPA member newspapers judge. So you never know if you’ll get the editor from the Drain Enterprise judging. Or perhaps an advertising rep.
In a five-state region the Emerald receives first place, but doesn’t take home the prize in its own state? And it loses general excellence to a paper that received not won, but received four or five other awards?
Sounds pretty shitty, if you ask me. Who are these judges?
You’ve got to love winners like this from the Vanguard:
Cock-, shit-, bitch- and ass-free-television, Christian-style
The ONPA sure knows how to pick a winner…especially following on the heels of Kleckner’s Ol’ Dirty winning last year’s General Excellence.
Olly–
Let’s be honest: ONPA is pretty subjective. Our Society of Professional Journalist awards are more noteworthy.
For instance, it’s not sour grapes, but the 50-inch story I wrote on the first same-sex marriage in Oregon history, an event that no other student newspaper in the state covered, lost to a Vanguard story about plumbers at PSU in the “best news story” category. For perspective, my same-sex marriage story won a national award that garnered me 500 bucks.
I’m not complaining, though. We did well.