Best of Colorado Individual Student Contests 2013

IMPORTANT! We are mov­ing to a new, improved con­test host­ing site and we are just fin­ish­ing some work to make it even eas­ier for you to enter our Best of Col­orado con­tests. You will receive emails and a post­card with the login infor­ma­tion, and we hope those will be going out by March 22. The good news is that all the prepa­ra­tion work, cre­at­ing PDFs, etc., that you are used to, is still in effect. You will still upload PDFs. So please keep work­ing on prepar­ing your entries. And please be assured that despite some delays due to this change in hosts, an April 5 dead­line should take care of wor­ries. The new site will actu­ally make judg­ing quicker and eas­ier and we promise you will still receive award cer­tifi­cates early in May.

The new con­test web­site is www.betternewspapercontest.com

We are also send­ing a post­card to ensure that this infor­ma­tion gets through. We con­tinue to hear sto­ries of dis­trict fil­ters gob­bling up CHSPA emails, iCon­tact newslet­ters, etc.

Our indi­vid­ual con­tests in year­book, news­pa­per and video media, called the Best of Col­orado awards, are back for 2013, with no sig­nif­i­cant changes in cat­e­gories. Gen­eral rules for the con­tests should be down­loaded first. Please note that web­sites should enter news­pa­per cat­e­gories and may choose to enter select video cat­e­gories, as well (and this may require sub­mit­ting both a news­pa­per and a video entry form). Please con­tact CHSPA at jpkjournalism@gmail.com if you have ques­tions.

Please note one change when you go on our new con­test site: you are now asked to include your school’s offi­cial enroll­ment fig­ure, grades 9–12 (or 6–8 if appro­pri­ate to mid­dle school). We will deter­mine Class I, II and III win­ners by rel­a­tive enroll­ments of enter­ing schools, attempt­ing to equal­ize the num­bers of schools in each clas­si­fi­ca­tion. All video media entries are judged in one classification.

The list of cat­e­gories for each medium can be down­loaded by choos­ing Best of Col­orado news­pa­per instruc­tions 2013, or Best of Col­orado year­book instruc­tions 2013 or Best of Col­orado video instruc­tions 2013.

You can also down­load spe­cific instruc­tions:  Prep­ping news­pa­per entries, and Prep­ping year­book entries. Video media instruc­tions are con­tained in email form, and involve no upload­ing — just links to stream­ing video.

If you have not received your new login instruc­tions (they will be sent to your school email account) by March 25, please con­tact Jack Kennedy at  jpkjournalism@gmail.com. We highly rec­om­mend at least send­ing a test PDF to the con­test site as soon as you can to avoid chaos on April 5, which tries to avoid con­flicts due to so many dis­tricts hav­ing a rather late spring break.

Here are some key ideas behind the changes:
1. Many mem­bers have noted that get­ting indi­vid­ual awards in Octo­ber misses our grad­u­ated seniors, who are long gone. There would be more excite­ment if awards could be given in May, per­haps dur­ing school awards nights, or Quill & Scroll ini­ti­a­tions, etc.
2. Because indi­vid­ual awards were cou­pled with Sweep­stakes, lim­its were placed on num­ber of entries, par­tic­u­larly for news­pa­per. With the All-Colorado Awards, over­all media cri­tiques do not depend on indi­vid­ual entries. Media can enter as many or as few cat­e­gories as they wish, based on their unique school situations.

Entries for news­pa­per, web­site and video media need to have been published/broadcast in the period August 1 — March 31, while year­book entries must be sched­uled for pub­li­ca­tion in the lat­est book.

Again, a medium can enter as few or many indi­vid­ual cat­e­gories as desired, with no penalty regard­ing being named All-Colorado (please see that page on our site for details).