Periodical Staff Writing for External Audiences

2010 Circle of Excellence Awards Program

Judges Report

CASE Districts I-IV

As we reviewed the 34 entries in this category, we appreciated seeing the ingenuity of our colleagues in telling the stories that matter to their readers. As fellow communicators, we applaud all the hard work represented by the materials that we read.

Overall, though, we were struck overall by a lack of consistency and a lack of variety. While those two factors may sound mutually exclusive, hear us out. On the consistency front, there were few entries that contained five equally good stories. Instead, many of the entries had one or two good stories, and the others were of average or poor quality. Similarly, few of the entries contained a good mix of stories. Several of the entries had five stories that were all of similar length. We really appreciated the entries with a true variety in the length and tone of the stories. Also, we felt a lot of the stories lacked good quotes that expressed the speaker's personality, emotion or character.

One more piece of advice we'd like to offer future entrants: Please give as much thought to the content of your entry form as you do to your story selection. In some cases, there wasn't enough information for us to understand the goals of a particular publication or the audience(s) it was designed to reach. The entry form is prime real estate for "selling" your publication - use it wisely!

Here are our thoughts on the winning entries:

Gold: Pitt Med -University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. One of the few entries where all five stories were well-written, and with a good mix of short and long stories. The ledes were all engaging (especially the lemur/ACL story), and the lively, engaging writing carried the reader through to the end. One of our judges knows a lot about ACL injuries, and said he came away from this piece with new information. Outstanding work.

Silver: Endeavors -University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. All of the stories were well-edited and had a good rhythm. We appreciated the strong characters in each story and felt like we gained insights from each piece. We also appreciated the lack of boosterism and self-promotion that can often be found in university publications. Our one concern was that the entry form didn't tell us enough about the type of publication Endeavors is supposed to be (a research magazine?) or its intended audience.

Bronze: The Pennsylvania Gazette - University of Pennsylvania. Consistently strong writing throughout all five stories, with a good mix of research and institutional subject matter. We especially liked the boxing article - definitely not boring! One quibble with this entry is that the stories were too similar in length, and that we felt the stories could have been more substantive. But overall, we enjoyed reading them.

Bronze: UNH Magazine - University of New Hampshire. Compelling storytelling - particular the piece on the judge. We liked that story a lot, and felt it contained one of the best quotes in any of the submissions (the "hell, no ..." quote). We also appreciated the fact that the quote was used in the right place for the story, rather than being forced up higher. We felt the stories that were submitted would be especially meaningful to the magazine's readers. Nice job all around.