Start prepping your Best of Colorado entries

March 23 — Due to a large num­ber of dis­tricts with a late spring break this year, the dead­line has been extended to Tues­day, April 3, midnight.

March 1 - All entries for our sec­ond spring indi­vid­ual award com­pe­ti­tion, the Best of Col­orado Awards, must be uploaded prior to April 1, 2012. This is an all-electronic con­test, with no mail­ing required (though there is an option to mail DVDs or CDs for video broad­cast entries only). Judg­ing will be done by a vari­ety of pro­fes­sional and scholas­tic jour­nal­ists from across the nation, awards will be given by enroll­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tions (3A, 4A, 5A) and results will arrive at each school in the form of award cer­tifi­cates in early May.

We hope the timely arrival of these cer­tifi­cates will lead to cel­e­bra­tions of indi­vid­ual stu­dent achieve­ment dur­ing end-of-year media awards cer­e­monies, Quill and Scroll cer­e­monies, or school awards pre­sen­ta­tions. After all, there has been some ter­rific work done this year among Col­orado scholas­tic journalists.

School media may enter as many or as few of the con­test cat­e­gories as desired, but may only enter once per cat­e­gory. Only cur­rent CHSPA mem­ber media may enter this con­test, and there are no addi­tional fees for mem­bers to take advan­tage of this com­pe­ti­tion. If a school medium is not a cur­rent mem­ber, renew­ing or start­ing a mem­ber­ship is the first step in enter­ing this com­pe­ti­tion, as only mem­bers will be sent the login and pass­word for the CHSPA con­test site (where all entries will be uploaded).

Step-by-step instruc­tions can be found here:
1. Gen­eral instruc­tions and back­ground on the con­tests for all media.
2. The list of con­test cat­e­gories for year­book, cat­e­gories for news­pa­per, and cat­e­gories for video broad­cast.
3. Spe­cific instruc­tions for year­book entries and spe­cific instruc­tions for news­pa­per entries. Video entry instruc­tions are sent directly to mem­ber video broad­cast media advis­ers.
IMPORTANT: please export all entries as PDFs in SMALLEST FILE SIZE for­mat, which will speed uploads and down­loads — pro­ce­dures are in the instruc­tions for spe­cific media.
4. Fill in the entry form (in Microsoft Word for­mat) for newspaper/newsmagazine, for year­book, or for video broad­cast. Then be sure to upload that Word doc­u­ment when you upload your con­test entries to the con­test web­site (www.chspacontests.org)

All cur­rent mem­bers will receive an email (through the adviser) with login and pass­word for access­ing the con­test site not later than March 10. That same email will include a Word doc­u­ment for advis­ers to fill in that will con­tain stu­dent names, etc. The actual upload­ing of con­test sub­mis­sions takes very lit­tle time, and we rec­om­mend that advis­ers only han­dle this. Prepar­ing entries is more labor-intensive, requir­ing staffs to sort through mate­r­ial from the cur­rent school year, choose their best efforts, and cre­ate copies of those pages or spreads in a con­test folder.

The drop dead dead­line is that all sub­mis­sions must be uploaded to the con­test site by mid­night, March 31, along with the Word doc­u­ment which func­tions as the medium’s offi­cial entry form. All award cer­tifi­cates are gen­er­ated from these forms, so please dou­ble check for accuracy.

March is a busy month, with all sorts of dead­lines, TCAP, spring break, etc., but we hope advis­ers and staffs will take a few pre­cious min­utes to gather entries and be part of this com­pe­ti­tion. Last May nearly 1,400 cer­tifi­cates were awarded to Col­orado stu­dent journalists.