Our industry peers have honoured us with lots of awards the past few years. You can read me boasting here, here, here, also here, and here, after columnist Allen Garr netted us our first Webster this past November.
Awards are gratifying and humbling. They are also yet another major deadline in a work week based on continual deadlines. Annual deadlines for two of the biggest awards, the provincial Ma Murray community newspaper awards and the national Canadian Community Newspaper Awards, fall in January. Both awards organizations give us ample warning ahead of time about the deadlines, but January comes on the heels of December, which is a month of early deadlines thanks to compressed work weeks due to the holidays and various special editions.
We scramble in December, take a short breath for the holidays, and then as soon as we're finding our feet in January and ramping up for the year, we have to go through our archives to find our best material to enter into awards. (It didn't help that we moved our offices across town in the last two weeks of December with all the expected chaos a major move involved.) That can take hours, as can preparing submissions for entry. Most submissions are entered digitally through pdfs of print pages, but some categories, such as the general excellence awards which looks at the newspaper as a whole, involve sending complete copies by mail. On deadline, of course. That's the reason for the mess on my desk the past week as we sort through our entries.
It's a lot of work no one looks forward to. Win or lose, it's worth it.
