Sacramento Press Journalism Open

The Open hits the home stretch

2009-10-26T05:33:04Z

We are all writers here at The Sacramento Press, so we understand the concept of "pushing the deadline." Writers are born procrastinators.

But time is running out to enter the The Sacramento Press Pro-Am Journalism Open - it ends this Saturday!

If you post your story before midnight on Halloween, you will be eligible for some great prizes, including a weekend at Squaw Valley (with dinner at Plump Jack). We're offering prizes from $100-500 for the best contributions to the site, with other prizes including custom reporters' kits, complete with a Sacramento Press-branded digital voice recorder.

But this isn't just about prizes - those are to get your attention, and award good work.

The Sacramento Press is about something bigger. Starting conversations - and keeping them going.

The conversation starts with your story. You can write about nearly anything, as long as it is about people, places, ideas, conflicts and events in the Sacramento area. The idea is to get residents to write about the things that concern all of us - or perhaps just a few of us.

The more local, the better.

Come join us at The Sacramento Press in reinventing journalism in a way that serves the ordinary citizen in difficult times.

And do it this week! Visit sacramentopress.com/open for all the details about the Sacramento Press Journalism Open.

Welcome to The Sacramento Press Journalism Open!

2009-09-16T00:14:43Z

We're so glad you're interested in The Sacramento Press Journalism Open! Not only can you win some great prizes, you can also have an effect on your community and gain some skills in the bargain! Contributing to our site is quick and easy - we can show you everything you need to know to take the act of making journalism into your own hands!

I'm David Watts Barton, the managing editor of The Sacramento Press, our area's top hyper-local, citizen-written news website, where we focus on up-close, in-depth coverage of neighborhoods like yours. We aim to spread the traditional habits of good journalism - accuracy, fairness and a diversity of opinion - across the Web. We do it with a mix of professional and amateur writing from around the community.

We're hosting this contest because we want you to join us! The future of journalism may depend on you: Your ideas, your questions, and the answers you find will increase the amount of good, local information you and your fellow citizens need to make informed decisions, whether it's about city government or where to go for entertainment. And once you've asked the questions you want answered, we want you to write for The Sacramento Press - because citizens like you are The Sacramento Press!

This contest is a pro-am, where writers of all skill levels and points of view are welcome to write about what you know and about what interests you.

We urge you to think small: The blighted vacant lot on your street, the business person you patronize, the leader you admire, the trend you abhor, the community group you support, the artist living above you, the band rehearsing next door. What don't you understand about your neighborhood? What's great about it? What's changing? These questions will lead you to more questions, questions will lead you to people you don't know, and people will lead you to stories that need to be told.

We're here to help: In addition to providing the platform to publish, we also offer copy editing and workshops on various aspects of journalism, from interview techniques to the use of social media. We will do everything we can to help you create the best journalism you can!

And don't forget the prizes! For more on that and on how to enter your work in The Sacramento Press Journalism Open, read on!

Join us in the first Sacramento Press Journalism Open. And remember, we are here to help you commit the best acts of journalism you can! Contact us at The Sacramento Press: To utilize our free copy editing, simply e-mail your story to journalism@sacramentopress.com and we'll send the edited version back to you. Colleen Belcher, journalism support manager, is at colleen@sacramentopress.com. Managing editor David Watts Barton is at david@sacramentopress.com.

Prizes

Journalism as a profession has taken its lumps lately, but there's still money to be made, especially if you win one of the many prizes offered in The Sacramento Press Journalism Open!

Our Grand Prize winner will enjoy a weekend for two at The Village at Squaw Valley and a meal for two at world famous PlumpJack restaurant. We'll even throw in $50 for gas money!

Our contest's first-place winner will get $500 and an original portrait of themselves by Wall Street Journal sketch artist Noli Novak; second place receives $250 and third through fifth places, $100.

All winners, including the 10 additional winners in the more specific categories below, will win a Sacramento Press journalism kit that includes an Olympus digital recorder, a bio-degradable pen, a reporter's notebook and a stylish Sacramento Press T-shirt.

Winners will be announced on Monday, Nov. 16, 2009.

How to Enter

Simply go to the top of this page and click the "Sign Up" button and follow the prompts. You will be asked for information and to sign off on our terms of use agreement. After you are signed up, click the "Write" button at the top of the page and start writing!

We suggest that you write your story in a separate writing application and then, when you've finished and had it copy edited, cut and paste it into our site.

We encourage you to take advantage of our free copy editing before you post your article. To get your story copy edited, e-mail it to journalism@sacramentopress.com.

Important: Every story you enter/post on the site must be tagged "Open2009" in the tag section. Just write those words in the space provided.

Hit "Publish" and you have posted your first story on The Sacramento Press. You've also been entered in The Sacramento Press Journalism Open!

Categories & Criteria for Judging

Entries will be judged by our editorial staff, and that judgment will be subjective. But we will be using criteria for what we think good journalism is. Among those criteria are:

Accuracy: Facts, spelling and quotes should be correct. Double-check everything and use your computer’s spell check.
Writing style: Writing should be clear, concise and enjoyable.
Local focus: Stories should be set in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer or El Dorado counties.
Sourcing: Include a minimum of two living, breathing sources in your story. Aim to include different perspectives. Wikipedia, about.com, press releases and book or newspaper excerpts are not acceptable sources.
Impact: Your story will also be judged on how readers react in the conversation on The Sacramento Press, as well as how it is received in the real world.

Stories can be any length, but they must be original non-fiction about the Sacramento area.

Stories may not be re-posts from blogs or other publications, print or online.

Ten additional prizes will be awarded to stories that succeed in various areas, as judged by our staff of professional journalists:

Best lede (opening paragraph)
Most original story idea
Best-researched article
Best "get" (unusual story or difficult-to-get interview)
Most widely read story
Most community interaction (in conversation section)
Best headline
Best quote
Best use of the Storyline feature
Best accompanying photos

All entries will be eligible for all these categories, as well as the top prizes.

Rules

To be eligible, stories must be posted on the site, by you, between 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 1, 2009 and 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 31, 2009. We will help you post from Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 at 10 a.m. through 6 p.m. until Friday, Oct. 30, 2009; you may come to our office during weekday business hours (M-F, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) to post on our computers. You may enter as many different stories as you like, but please enter/post each story only once! Make sure to tag it "Open2009" in the tag section or it will not be counted as a submission. There is no charge to enter. We will shred and recycle any entries that come in on dead trees - we're an online newspaper! Again, you must post the story yourself.

Entries will be judged by The Sacramento Press' editorial department. Decisions will be final.

We want you to win! We offer copy editing and advice on reporting. There will be a workshop on Oct. 13 to help answer your questions. Be careful that you're happy with what you've written; once it is published on the site, it cannot be modified.

You must live in one of our four home counties, and be at least 18 years of age.

Sacramento Press Journalism Open winners!

2009-11-17T08:56:21Z

The winners of the first Sacramento Press Pro-Am Journalism Open have been chosen.

Historian William Burg claimed the Grand Prize with his detailed, well-reasoned and beautifully-written list of 10 suggestions on how K Street might be returned to its former glory. Frequent Sacramento Press contributors Ali Tabatabai, Rhonda Erwin and Marion Millin also took top prizes, as did first-time community contributor Stephanie Rodriquez and our part-time copy editor Elisa Hough.

Their prizes will range from $100-500, with Burg’s prize a weekend at Squaw Valley. Other contributors won prizes for smaller aspects of their stories, whether the accompanying photos, a great quote or a well-turned headline. A list of the winners follows.

The prizes were decided by Sacramento Press Editor-in-Chief and co-founder Geoff Samek, Journalism Support Manager Colleen Belcher and Managing Editor David Watts Barton. We read all 82 of the entries that came in during October, and did our best to find those that reflected what we want The Sacramento Press to be. We read them without names attached, though we of course saw most of the stories as they were first posted on the site. Our goal was to find the stories that met our minimal criteria, but we also looked for things we enjoyed. Our decisions were subjective.

Most of the people who wrote for the contest are not professional journalists, but citizen contributors, and the entries reflected that. While some writers followed standard journalistic practices of calling multiple sources and trying to thread a line through conflicting versions of the truth, many others did not. We found that we enjoyed some of both. Whether an objective news story or a passionate rant, we learned something from nearly all of them.

Grand Prize winner Burg is a trained historian, though he has done some paid journalism as well. His story on K Street didn’t aim to seek out experts for expert comment; he is an expert, and likely knows more about his subject than anyone he could call. Author of books on Sacramento history and a professional historian, Burg is also a midtown resident and someone who cares about the future, as well as the past, of his adopted hometown. His story brought all of that together.

First Prize winner Ali Tabatabai is an aspiring journalist; in fact, he has his bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State, and earlier this year he won fourth place in the 49th annual William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program. So let’s lose the “aspiring” modifier. He won the First Prize in our contest for his story on what happened to all that debris after our recent wind storm a few weeks back, talking to sources about something so mundane we might all overlook it; except it is actually pretty interesting stuff.

Some stories were powerfully moving. Rhonda Erwin didn’t approach her Second Place winner, “Our Cries Echo From One Sacramento Neighborhood to Another,” as a traditional journalist. She didn’t need to call anyone for quotes; She didn’t interview her subjects, she knows them. She didn’t speak to them as a journalist, she spoke to them as something more: a member of their community. Only later did the story itself come, bringing the raw details of teenage death among African-American youth in our city to the computer screen. Erwin’s piece was something MORE than journalism. She was speaking for those who can’t, and writing (beautifully) for those too discouraged to sit down at a computer and write.

Like Ali’s story, Stephanie Rodriguez’ story on our local ‘zine culture found the writer contacting a number of sources to talk about a cultural phenomenon; on the other hand, neighborhood activist Marion Millin didn’t pretend to be objective when she took on the issue of Sacramento High School and the lack of a high school in the central city. Objective? No. Passionate, informed, detailed and enlightening? Oh, yes.

Finally, one of our copy editors, Elisa Hough, tackled the most mundane sort of story, about a community meeting in Curtis Park to discuss details of Paul Petrovich’s plans to develop the old Union Pacific Railyard. She strove for balanced views from both sides, and in doing so, captured a moment in the democratic process that could all-too-easily been lost amongst the bigger, more "important" stories.

Could these stories have been better? Sure. Did you read them anywhere else? No. Because the Sacramento Press is giving people a chance to tell their imperfect stories directly, in a forum unlike any other. There's a very good chance that none of these stories would have been told, in any medium, without these community contributors.

We are also giving 10 smaller prizes for specific elements of stories that stood out. These winners, listed below, all have something to recommend them. Michael Zwahlen’s post about the proposed Community Center Theater renovation wasn’t in-depth - it was only two paragraphs long, with two illustrations - but it announced to the community a process that hadn’t been covered in any other media outlet that we know of - at least, not until he posted it on SacPress - and that made it our winner for Best “Get.” Seeing the story appear a couple of days later on local TV was proof enough for us.

Other winners included those for Best Lede, Most Original Story or Best Use of the Storyline, one of Sacramento Press’s most compelling features. We enjoyed reading these stories, and we look forward to many, many more community contributions over the year until the Second Sacramento Press Journalism Open starts.

But no need to wait for that, right?

Here are all ten of the category winners, who got “reporter’s packs” for their efforts.

Best Quote
Ryan Kinsel
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16016

Best Lede
Marion Millin
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16758

Most Original
Kate Traci, for her first person description of life as a 911 dispatcher
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16753

Most Researched
Ali Tabatabai, for his story on storm debris
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16551

Best “Get”
Michael Zwahlen, Community Center Theater renovation
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/15863

Best Headline
Marion Millin, Stepping Out In Midtown: Beyond the Valet of the Dilettante
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16286

Best Use of the Storyline
Sue Wilson, for her series of stories on the Jennifer Strange Trial
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16740

Best Accompanying Photos
Kati Garner
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16757

Most Read
Anne Lowe, for her story on the County Sheriff issuing many more concealed weapons permits
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/16063

Most Commented-on
William Burg, for his story on K Street
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/15307