The envelope, please ….

My baby sister just won a national award for teaching science in middle schools. I’m proud of her, but she doesn’t want publicity. I texted her husband about it and he replied, “Man, you’re going to have to ask her…. she doesn’t tell me much of what she is doing.” All he knows is she’s going to St. Louis in April to accept the award. Which is great because she got sick and couldn’t go to Philadelphia to accept the award she won last year. Her principal went in her place, so he got the expense-paid trip part of the prize—the only money attached to the award went to her school. But it’s nice to get some affirmation. It’s that time of year. They handed out Grammys last week; the Academy Awards are next week. I’ve never paid too much attention to the former and while I’ll watch (and probably comment on) the latter out of a sense of professional responsibility, I always have to go to Google to find out who won Best Picture in the previous year. (Quick, what won? The Shape of Water. Really; Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of Creature From the Black Lagoon. Now tell me Roma doesn’t stand a chance.) While most working folks probably never get a chance to win awards, they get passed out like preschool valentines in some industries. My profession gives out a lot of awards. I’m ambivalent about that. I know they work in our business; every year I judge two or three journalism contests from other states or regions. I do my best, I’m very conscientious about reading every submission and thinking about how I would receive these pieces as an editor. I write comments on what I like and don’t like about the stories or books. I give them a lot of consideration. And usually I hate picking winners and losers. (Though there are no winners. It’s an honor just to be nominated. Sure it is.) I just got through judging a contest where almost every entry feels special. That doesn’t happen often. It made me proud of my profession to see the kind of work submitted—intelligent, crafty prose that analyzes complex stuff without condescending to its intended general audience. Some of it is beautiful. While there was a clear winner, I could understand how another reasonable person conscientiously applying the contest criteria could have come up with different results. I wouldn’t have had a problem with any of the submissions medaling, but you can’t give out 28 honorable mentions. On the other hand, in another contest I recently judged, I didn’t think there was any outstanding work at all. Some entries were better than others, some of them you could work with, but the entries ran from all right to mediocre to gratingly smug and amateurish. I still had to pick a winner. And a runner-up. And a third place. And an honorable mention. So some people are getting awards for work I wouldn’t publish. I guess that’s OK, because I get the feeling the only people who care about journalism awards are journalists. And we generally don’t care about them unless we win them. (We’re petty that way.) It’s nice to be able to put something down on a resume, or to add “award-winning” to your handout bio or column tagline, but most of us care more about the bonus check that might come with the plaque. And not every contest is created equal. In my business, if you send out enough clips and pay enough entry fees, sooner or later you’ll win something. Failing that, you can always nominate yourself for a Pulitzer. (While the Pulitzer committee

“discourages” people from calling themselves a Pulitzer nominee just because they sent in an entry, lots of people do—in some circles the phrase “Pulitzer-nominated” is code for “loser.”) That’s not to say that a lot of award-winning journalism isn’t special. It’s just that it always comes down to someone’s opinion, dude. There’s no objective scoreboard, just a bunch of human beings with biases and affinities and areas of particular interests. Sometimes it’s a panel of these subjective humans doing the judging; sometimes it’s only one guy. (Sometimes—shudder—it’s me.) Plus journalism is a pretty small world. I often recognize the bylines of the writers I’m called upon to judge. Sometimes I’ve read the work submitted in the category months before when it originally appeared. It didn’t happen this year, but there have been times in the past when some of the bylines have been more than just familiar—they belonged to people I worked with in a previous life, people I may have had a drink or supper with. I point this out to the contest administrators, wondering if I should recuse myself, and they say if I think I can be fair I should go ahead and judge the contest. So I do. And I do my best. But not everyone does. The Dallas Press Club’s Katie Awards blew up in 2007, after The Dallas Business Journal broke a story revealing that the press club’s former president fraudulently served as a one-woman judging panel for (at least) the 2004, 2005 and 2006 Katie Awards. Turns out she only claimed she was sending the entries out to be judged over that span. Which might have had something to do with her winning 10 Katie Awards over that span. That pretty much killed the Katies, which tried to come back in 2008 but disappeared. A couple of years ago the Dallas Press Club initiated the Hugh Aynesworth Journalism Awards in honor of the veteran Dallas-based investigative journalist (who they brought on as a kind of integrity consultant). I’m proud of my sister, but I understand her reluctance to talk about her award, especially to her nosy brother who might make a big deal about it in the newspaper. As she sees it, she’s just doing her job. And a lot of people who do their jobs quietly and with excellence never get a plaque or dinner or a round-trip ticket anywhere. Congratulations anyway, sister.