Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch won first place in the Associated Press Sports Editors 2019 contest for beat writing in the B Division.
Goold will be presented with his first-place plaque at the 2020 APSE Summer Conference Banquet on June 27 at The Alexander hotel in Indianapolis.
Contest chair Lisa Wilson and fellow APSE officers Todd M. Adams, Gary Potosky and Dan Spears prepared the entries. Sports editors in the B Division submitted 66 entries in the category.
Click here to join and enter the contest for 2020.
In February, preliminary judges at the APSE Winter Conference in St. Petersburg, Fla., and off-site around the country, selected a top 10, with each judge ranking the entries in order from 1 to 10 separately on a secret ballot. Entries were given 10 points for a first-place vote, nine points for second and so on down to one point for a 10th-place vote. The final 10 were given to a second judging group, which ranked the entries 1-10 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 summer conference. The second- through 10th-place writers will receive frameable certificates.
Beat writing is a collection of five pieces by a single author that shows authoritative, newsy and innovative coverage of a beat. Each writer was required to submit one breaking news story, one event or game coverage story and one enterprise story. The final two pieces were to the writer’s discretion, and could include multimedia presentations.
A list of the Top 10:
- Derrick Goold, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1 2 3 4 5, 58 points
- Blake Toppmeyer, Knoxville News Sentinel 1 2 3 4 5, 48 points
- Sam McKewon, Omaha World-Herald 1 2 3 4 5, 42 points
- Matt Velazquez, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 1 2 3 4 5, 38 points
T-5. Paul Skrbina, The Tennessean (Nashville, Tenn.) 1 2 3 4 5, 36 points
T-5. Kyle Rowland, The Blade (Toledo, Ohio) 1 2 3 4 5, 36 points
7. Adam Fisher, Naples Daily News 1 2 3 4 5, 34 points
8. Pete Caldera, The Record (Bergen, N.J.) 1 2 3 4 5, 33 points
9. Dave Matter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1 2 3 4 5, 31 points
10. Mike Niziolek, The Roanoke Times 1 2 3 4 5, 29 points
