April 3, 2017
APSE First Vice President
Justin King and Justin Yurkanin of AL.com won first place for their short video in the Associated Press Sports Editors 2016 contest’s Over-175,000 circulation category.
King and Yurkanin won for their video on a top-rated linebacker’s commitment to Alabama. They will be presented a first-place plaque at the 2017 APSE banquet. The banquet and awards dinner concludes the late-June APSE Summer Conference in New Orleans.
Sports editors in the Short Video category submitted a total of 18 entries this year. The contest is open to APSE members. Click here to join.
Contest chair Jeff Rosen and fellow APSE officers Tommy Deas, John Bednarowski and Robert Gagliardi numbered each entry, assuring they had been stripped of headlines, graphics, bylines and any other element that would identify the writer or news organization.
In February, preliminary judges at the APSE Winter Conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and off-site around the country selected a top five in this category, with each judge ranking the entries in order from 1 to 5 separately on a secret ballot. Entries were given 5 points for a first-place vote, 4 points for second and so on down to one point for a fifth-place vote. The final five were then given to a second judging group, which ranked the entries 1-5 in the same fashion. The winner and final rankings are determined by tallying the ballots.
The winner in each category will receive a plaque at the 2017 APSE Summer Conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans June 26-29. (Click here to register for the conference.) The second- through fifth-place entrants will receive frameable certificates.
In the Short Video category, entries up to two minutes in length were judged on their strength of storytelling. Visual and auditory quality were also considered.
The top five are listed below with links to writers’ Twitter pages, APSE member websites and winning entries.
