Been thinking for a long moment about media / journalistic prestige, which is conveyed in part through awards. Awards cost $ and significant amounts of time (and expertise) to enter, and are judged almost exclusively by people whose jobs allow them to do this extra work for free.

As a result, media awards are dominated by people who are benefitting from significant editorial infrastructure and expertise, and are then judged by people with the particular access, perspectives and backgrounds that have allowed them to be considered to bestow these awards.

That means folks get shut out at multiple points: if you don’t have the time or $ to enter, or access to the “best practices” that help your entry get considered, or if your work makes it through all those hoops and then doesn’t “appeal” to people with specific perspectives.

And even you’re a person in a newsroom that has access to that $ / money / infrastructure, you still need a champion to consider your work “worthy” of entering, which compounds existing dynamics. (I am still very, very salty about some of what I’ve experienced / witnessed here).

Think about what this means for freelancers, for people who’ve been laid off, for people who don’t have the ability to spend 40+ hours of work on judging. Think about what that means about who wins, and how the compounds the perception of prestige and worthiness.

So: I wish more awarding bodies paid judges. I wish more editors thought hard about what they consider to be “award worthy”. I wish more newsrooms with the time and $ and expertise to consistently win awards shared those best practices with other orgs and individuals.

I wish more philanthropic orgs that support media consider the signal of asking about “awards won” as part of the grant making process. I wish we talked more about this hidden curriculum in media.

(If your response to this thread is “I don’t get paid to judge so I make time to do it on weekends” I’d like to gently suggest that this is not a “solve”, it’s the exact problem of the structure and the incentives.)