01/18/2024
- A Message from the Committee Regarding Published Works -
This November, in an unprecedented move for major journalism competitions, the NPPA posted provisional rules for the Best of Photojournalism contest. For several weeks, these were available online while we actively solicited and received feedback from members. Some of this feedback was incorporated, all of it was discussed.
For many years, the Still Photojournalism division did not require the publication of work for photographs to be entered, but all five of the other divisions did have this requirement. As part of a lengthy review of the contest, we decided to align Still Photojournalism with the other divisions. During our provisional period, we received only one comment expressing confusion or concern about how this would be enforced, and no strong pushback. Given this, we decided to finalize those rules with some clarifications.
This contest spans six different divisions: Still Photojournalism, Video Photojournalism, Video Editing, Photo Editing, Documentary, and Online Video Presentation and Innovation. A big reason that we retool the rules on a yearly basis is to ensure that they accurately represent the industry. Another, as directed by the NPPA executive committee, is to slowly bring all the divisions — which had been disparate contests — into general alignment.
The BOP committee feels strongly that disseminating a finished product is an integral part of the act of journalism. Reporting is the act of gathering news. Journalism, by almost every definition, requires reporting and distributing the news. If you make an amazing photograph, be it of a war crime or a conflagration at a city council meeting, is it journalism if it sits on your hard drive for a year? If journalism is meant to inform the public, what public is informed by unpublished journalism? Of course, this doesn't mean that creating those photographs is not an act of journalism — the NPPA protects and will continue to protect journalists in the act of reporting. However, for the purposes of a contest, we do need to draw lines to define what is eligible and what is not. We are not alone in this view. Many prestigious journalism contests — the SPJ awards, Peabody, ONA, NAB, the Pulitzer Prize and more — require submitted work to be published.
We also considered how this change might help bring this one division in line with the contest as a whole: Is it fair to require publication for some entries but not all? And we considered the mechanics of running this contest, which relies on the unpaid volunteer labor of hundreds of your peers judging entries and running the technical and editorial components of the process. Given the rise of AI tools, and the thousands of entries we receive each year, is it feasible for volunteer judges to spot AI generated images and go through the flagging process to receive and view RAW photos for that many entries? Requiring publication also seemed like a small, albeit imperfect, way to cut down on ineligible entries and make running the contest a feasible task for a group of volunteers. This was not the main component of our decision, but it did affect that decision making.
However, we have heard from many of you in the past few days expressing passionate opposition to the publication requirement, citing a variety of factors from equitable access to editors and publishing options to the role awards play in getting work published inside and outside of newsrooms. While we did not appreciate the tone of certain comments that made personal attacks on committee members, we did listen carefully to the frustrations and feedback that they expressed. We volunteer for this work to make rules that serve you, not to create ones that hamper you, and in this regard, we missed the mark.
We want to best serve our members, and the current rules aren't doing that. So, we are revising the rules of this year's contest, and extending the entry period to 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, January 24. If you have already submitted your work, you will be able to reopen your entry to make changes.
Under these revised rules, work that was made and self-published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, including work published on social media, is allowed to be submitted. Unpublished work is still not eligible.
We revise the contest yearly, and we are extending an earnest invitation to all the members who gave us passionate and well-argued feedback over the last few days to be an active part of rewriting these rules next year, with the goal of creating a more sustainable contest into the future. This revision discussion will be in addition to the provisional period for feedback on the full contest rules.
This contest is for you, and that is what separates it from any other journalism awards. You are the members that run NPPA, the committee that shapes the rules, and the judges that volunteer to run the contest every year. We want you — NEED you — to have an active voice in shaping the contest. Thank you all for making your concerns known to us this year, and we look forward to working with you ahead of next contest season to make the contest better, bigger, and more equitable for all entrants.
