| President’s
Letter
Does your publication win
awards because it’s great?
by Steve Roll, National
President, ASBPE
Senior State Tax Law Editor,
BNA Tax & Accounting
 Young
people continue to smoke, despite all the
efforts to spread
the word that the habit can kill them. The
crux of the problem, according to
Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling
book The Tipping Point, is
that kids are not cool because they smoke.
Rather, they smoke because they’re
cool.
Gladwell cites studies
that list the personality
traits of smokers.
This catalog of behaviors conjures the
image of James Dean in Rebel
Without a Cause: a tendency to take
risks, defiance, sexual precocity, and impulsiveness. That cigarette dangling
from Dean’s lips or
tucked behind his ear wasn’t there
because the legendary star was trying to
be cool. It was just part of the whole cool
package.
The same
conundrum exists with publications that
consistently come out ahead in the annual
Azbee Awards of Excellence competition.
Last
year, in preparation for an ASBPE webinar
about our annual competition, Warren Hersch,
ASBPE’s New York chapter president,
sent perennial Azbee Award winner Don Tennant
a list of discussion points. One of the questions
raised: “Does
the publication or company develop specific
editorial content with a view to winning
awards? If so, what have been the results?
Since entering award competitions, have you
changed the
way you develop editorial
content and research, write, or edit articles?”
Tennant took issue with
the question in an
editor’s letter
in Computerworld. The questions reflect “a
forgetfulness of purpose,” Tennant
said. He explained that his publication’s
success “lies
in an approach that’s
based on serving the needs of our readers,
which is the sole determiner of our editorial
content.
If we do that well, the awards and
recognition will naturally follow.”
But Tennant’s co-speaker
on the webinar, Hanley Wood’s Boyce Thompson,
took the opposite approach. Thompson encourages
his staff to craft stories with interesting
hooks that are likely to appeal to judges
of editorial competitions — people
who might not be familiar
with the housing industry. From the number
of Azbees Hanley Wood has won
over the years, most would agree that Thompson’s
approach is equally effective.
So whether you believe
your publication is worthy of an award because
it’s great,
or
you think your publication is awesome because
it wins awards, prove you are better than
the competition by entering the
2009 Azbee Awards of Excellence competition.
In either
case, there’s never been
a more important time to show your readers
and advertisers
that your publication is first-rate. This is especially so
if you work for a print publication. Recognizing
that the
reports
of print’s death have been greatly
exaggerated, ASBPE’s winter competition
and the
awards banquet in July will be exclusively
devoted to print publications.
ASBPE believes that print-based
publications deserve their own special recognition.
Internet-based publications will compete
in a separate competition to be held in the
summer, with the winners announced in
the fall.
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