Ten 95

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Moral of the Story: Toot your own horn

Oh, somebody done messed up now.

We got the e-mail on Monday begging for submissions for the monthly writing contest my paper holds. Basically, its a way to boost morale in an industry that is severely depressed. We nominate our coworkers writing and tell everyone how great they are for crafting their lede or setting the scene.

It's kinda like a low-grade version of the Grammy's for word nerds like us.

I looked over the categories: deadline, public service, developed, single editon, wild card. As I scanned through the entries, I saw that no one from my bureau had been nominated. So I looked in our archives and gathered about 7 articles, about two from each of us, and sent them to the committee.

Randomly, today, I checked the Today Show (our internal message board) to see if anyone from my bureau won. They had.

Single Edition: "Raiche Packs Up 3 Decades of Memories," by Talia Buford.

So much for humility.

Okay, even if this is just my company's low budget version of the Grammys, I'm still super excited. See, this is my first award as a professional. Technically, I've been a pro in this whole journalism game for 17 months, even though I've been a journalist since the late 1990s. I won a few awards in college, and I even submitted my first clip packet to the state journalism competition this year (still waiting on the results). But this is the first time I've won something while being paid to do this whole journalism thing for a living.

There's no money, certificate or statue that comes with this designation. But, so what? I won something. First, internal writing awards, next up: a Pulitzer.

Labels: milestones