Judging media competitions like the Qantas Media Awards is a time-consuming job, but it has tremendous rewards for a journalism school, says Whitireia journalism programme leader Jim Tucker. 
 
Being involved in annual awards is a great opportunity to catch up on all the industry gossip and to network with editors and journalists (some of whom are former students).

“It is an excellent way of interacting with the media industry because you see the entries for various awards.  It gives you a pretty good idea of current trends.”

Jim judged the best website section in the 2010 awards announced in June in Auckland.

Having judged the Qantas Media Awards off and on over the years it was the first time he had been given the news website section.

“I expect I was asked because we run the news website NewsWire here, which is regarded pretty well by the industry.”

Jim also judges other media prizes, including the NZ Magazine Publishers’ Association Awards, the Statistics New Zealand Award for best statistical news stories and the NZ Community Newspaper Association Awards.

The magazine awards are particularly intensive work, taking a couple of days to assess the dozens of portfolios.

“After you have been doing this for a while you can sometimes make a judgement from the first few paragraphs of someone’s feature, but with the better writers it takes an hour or two to thoroughly check their work.”

Criteria are provided for the magazine and community newspaper judging, but Qantas has always had one simple standard – excellence.

“Actually, I think that works best. It gives judges flexibility, which is sometimes not possible with highly structured judging guidelines.”

Sometime he comes across former students (Jim has been teaching journalism for more than 20 years) and wonders if he over-compensates: “But many of the judges are journalism lecturers, so we all face the same problem. It no doubt evens out.”

He says he has continued to judge the community newspapers awards because a lot of students are employed in that sector and it is one of the many important connections Whitireia Journalism School has with the industry. “It’s very useful to know the people.”

Jim Tucker, Journalism Programme Leader at Whitireia.