Have to love a deadline journalist. One of my jobs is to coordinate the coordination that is involved in coordinating nominations for student journalism awards. It leans a bit toward tedium sometimes, but our department likes to brag on award-winning students. We have quite a few worth such young men and women and so we do the contests because we want our share. Journalists like awards.
One of the better contests we enter has an odd holiday deadline this year. The nominations were due today. This could have somewhat put a crimp in the implementation phase considering how everyone had several days off last week and that goes against the very last minute nature of every journalist you’ve ever met.
So for weeks I’ve been sending my colleagues emails. Remember the rules, here’s what we have to do. Please have these things to me by this time. The deadline is 5 p.m. Monday.
I spent much of the day finalizing my portion of the contest. It is all online now, a big improvement. Once upon a time this took folders, a stenographer, two notary publics a series of semaphore motions, stamps, labels and ink obtained from the inner lining of an ostrich egg. That was a two day process.
I mean just curing the ink from the ostrich eggs.
This was of course all done after the bird had hatched.
So yes, selecting nominees still takes a bit of time, but I have a marvelous committee that makes that happen. And now, this year, it is simply a matter of finding, selecting, renaming and uploading the correct PDFs in the many categories. This only takes a few hours. (There are many categories.)
I received a phone call around noon or so from one of my colleagues with his nominees. I received an email from another at 3 p.m. with his nominees. At 4:46 I sent off the final document.
At 5:03 I received another email from the last colleague. He had no nominees this year. Well then.
We nominated student-journalists in 18 of 30 categories. We should have at least a few wins in there, hopefully.
You can see all of their work at the Crimson and SNN and various other corners of the Samford net.
Something new on Tumblr, there’s always something on Twitter and maybe on Google+ if we’re lucky.
