2022 JACC State Publications Contest--Deadline Extended to Jan. 31 at 9 p.m.
The BetterBNC website for the State publication contests are live and accepting contest entries. Click the button to go to login; once logged in, you need to select either the 2022 JACC State Publications Contest. You'll also see a button to download a copy of the JACC Publication Contest rules and criteria.
THIS YEAR'S DEADLINE: Jan. 21, 9 p.m. Pacific time Extended to Jan. 31, 9 p.m. Pacific time
If you have questions, or want more information, please see this message from the contest chair, Patrick Schmiedt:
"Hi JACC friends,
After a bit of a delay, the 2022 JACC State Publication Competition is now open! The 2022 JACC State Publication Competition is now live and the BetterBNC contest site is accepting entries at https://betternewspapercontest.com/login. The contest entry deadline is Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, 9 p.m. Pacific time Monday, Jan. 31, 9 p.m. Pacific time
If you need help, let me know! (Editor's Note: See listserv version of this message for Patrick's email and cell phone.) Sometimes the answer is quicker than we think, and I'd rather take a bunch of calls/emails and save you the frustration.
Some important things to pay attention to:
TIPS FROM FALL: Judges for the 2021 fall regional publication awards provided two important bits of feedback worth sharing. First – entries on BetterBNC allow for a "contestant entry comment." These areas are to be used only to clarify anything that might make an entry confusing for a judge. This comment area is NOT to be used to promote a particular student or entry for an award. The work should stand on its own. Judges have been instructed to disregard all "promotional" comments on entries and to report them to me so I can talk with the individual advisers.
Secondly, judges wanted me to let you know about consistency in the "headline" area of the entries. The "headline" box for BetterBNC should be your college ID number, followed by the category and entry number, e.g. for Citrus (my school), a headline might look like this: 127-Sports Game Story-1. The headline box should NOT say "Owls come back to beat Mounties" (or whatever the actual headline of the story is). This helps judges keep entries straight. The directions for the entries outline this process, so if you follow those, you should be good.
Some standing things to keep in mind with BetterBNC and with entries in general:
LOGGING IN: From https://betternewspapercontest.com/login, use the menu on the left to choose "2022 JACC State Publication Competition," then your school and password. The login to the BetterBNC site is by specific contest, so some folks have two different logins and passwords, one for the state contest and one for regionals. If you try the login/PW combination you used for regionals and it does not work, try the one you used for state 2021. If that fails, shoot me an email and I will look it up for you. If you cannot reach me, contact the BetterBNC support number (360) 427-6300 Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Pacific Time. BetterBNC works best on Google Chrome and Firefox for both PC and Mac.
DOUBLE-CHECK: Don’t forget to double-check before you are finished entering that all your entries are attached. You can see whether files were successfully uploaded or linked by checking your Manage Entries page. I will try to catch what I can, but your help and vigilance is appreciated. Also, if you have plans to update your website over winter break, it may be better to submit your contest entries as PDFs rather than links.
ENTRY PARTICULARS: The eligibility period for this contest is Jan. 1- Dec. 31, 2021, the entire calendar year. The contest entry site accepts writing entries as clips (cropped PDFs of the stories as they appeared in the print edition), or links to the stories in the online edition. Don’t submit Word or other similar document formats, or PDFs of Word documents. Photo entries are JPEGs with embedded captions and entrants are asked to reproduce the caption in the caption field in the online entry form. Pages are submitted as PDFs, and issues are submitted as links to the complete edition/s on Issuu or another similar platform, or to their online edition as appropriate. Isolated page entries may entered this way as well. If you find you have entered something in the wrong format, simply delete and re-upload the entry. Schools with sites that use a subscription or registration model for their sites must provide judges easy access to their sites by providing a password entered into the comments section of the BetterBNC entry. Be sure to link to the specific issues being entered. If judges cannot access entries, or know which issues are being entered, they can’t evaluate them.
PANDEMIC AND NEWSPAPER GE: Because of the ongoing pandemic, we are extending our temporary change to the rule for the Newspaper General Excellence contest. The usual rule requires a minimum of eight (8) print issues during the eligibility period to enter this category. That has been temporarily reduced to from 8 to 3 issues printed and/or posted on Issuu or a similar platform as print-designed newspapers, the number of issues required for entry. Note that the print-designed issues do not have to have been distributed in print this year to enter the contest. They may have been distributed electronically. But they must have been designed as broadsheet or tabloid print products as distinguished from an online news site. Be sure to provide links to three issues for the print GE entry, as this contest requires a set of three complete issues.
CONTEST ENTRY FEE: The contest entry fee for both the state and regional publication contests is $100 each, and the Wild Apricot event site is live for member colleges to generate contest fee invoices: http://jaocc.wildapricot.org/. The contest entry fee deadline is also Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. This deadline may be satisfied by creating a contest fee invoice in Wild Apricot even if it takes your Business Office longer to process payment. If you are one of the JACC member colleges that opted to pre-pay contest entry fees as part of a membership bundle ($500 membership fee plus $200 for the 2022 state and regional contests), you do not need to generate an entry fee invoice. If you don’t know whether you opted for the bundle or paid standard membership, you can check your account in Wild Apricot, or contact Joe Wirt at CNPA, which manages our organization ([email protected]).
JUDGES: One of the responsibilities of entering JACC contests is helping to provide judges to evaluate entries. Thanks to all of you, we have created a list of judges that have been suggested over the past several years that we have been working from, but we would like to add to that list because not everyone can continue to judge our contests twice a year, and some of the contact information is no longer current. So if you have any suggestions of new judges we would really appreciate it. Most categories require only a couple hours of evaluation time. But General Excellence categories require a bit more as we ask GE judges to complete evaluation forms to score publications based on specific criteria, so if you know anyone who would be willing to judge GE that would be awesome. Please send along the name and contact information of someone you have confirmed would like to help out with judging, and the broad category/ies they would like to judge to me ([email protected]) as soon as possible. We prefer working journalism professionals and those who have recently retired. Former JACC alums now working in the field always do a wonderful job, too, as do retired journalism professors no longer connected with a JACC journalism program.
We hope to see you at our spring conference, which is being run in partnership with the ACP spring West Coast convention. At this point, the convention is still scheduled for March 3-5, 2022, in person in Long Beach.
Please let me know if you have questions or encounter any contest entry problems, and thanks again for your patience as we worked to get the contest live. Take care and have a happy and healthy winter break!
Patrick Schmiedt
JACC Secretary-Treasurer
Contest Coordinator"
The contest entry site accepts:
