| President’s
Letter
The Azbee aura
by Roy Harris, National
President; Senior Editor, CFO
 The fax machines have stopped whirring, and anticipation is in
the air. At least it is at my magazine, CFO in Boston, and 150 other
publications around the country.
That’s because they’ve received ASBPE notices identifying them
as winners of 2006 national or regional Azbee
Awards of Excellence.
What they still don’t know is how their winning work
ranked at the top of the business-to-business world’s most extensive
competition. Is a gold award in their future? Or will theirs be
the honor of a silver or bronze?
But is all this
attention to awards overdone?
Journalism
prizes often are criticized because
of the time spent looking backwards
and preening for contest entries. Once the award is
won, some winners are embarrassed to
talk
about it.Many others seem swept up
by hubris.Who can disagree with
critics who say that winners from any group — whether journalists, Oscar- or Tony
winning actors, or Malcolm Baldridge recipients — sometimes go overboard as they
hold their trophies aloft and thank seemingly everyone on the planet for making the
honor possible. Don’t forget that kindergarten teacher.
The color of winning
But I see prizes
like the Azbees as an extremely healthy
influence on our business. And
this period before the “color” of the final award is determined may be the healthiest
time of all.
It is now that
editors, reporters, and publishers think
analytically about their best work, and
how readers respond to it. Certainly,
ASBPE judges aren’t ordinary readers.
But they do seriously put themselves in the role of the publication’s “real” subscribers
while they weigh how well such ideals as depth of research, fairness, and writing style
have been met.
One need only examine
the winners that will be on display at
our National
Editorial Conference next
July 2021 in Chicago, and featured on our Web site, to see that their
quality is uniformly high.
Moving up a notch
As some of you
know, I’ve been talking to winning newspaper journalists for a book
I’m writing about the Pulitzer Prizes. At the rarified level of Pulitzer performance, too,
I encounter awkwardness and embarrassment in talking about awards they won. I get
beyond that quickly. These winners have no problem discussing the work that went
into the journalism. And it’s the work, of course, that interests me most. The process of
how the Pulitzers are decided is a secondary theme, for me and, I hope, for my readers.
So should it be
with the Azbee winners. It is the work
that matters. And it is now —
while introspection is still shaded by a note of uncertainty, and before any embarrassment
or self-congratulation kicks in — that editors concentrate mainly on what they
can do to move an article, a photo spread, or the whole publication, from “among the
best” to the very top. A few publications will manage to do just that next year.
I congratulate
the Azbee winners, and encourage them
to intensify their introspection. And
to any contestants who may have little
to show for your 2006 entries, I invite
you to keep using the Azbees as a standard
for measuring your own excellence.We
at
ASBPE are committed to making it a
better standard each year.
Go
to President’s
Letter Archives
Return
to the Main Archives Page
|
