The Associated Press Sports Editors contests continue to evolve. These changes were discussed and announced at the 2015 APSE Summer Conference in San Diego.
The biggest change is the adoption of a mandatory window for Daily section entries rather than specific dates. For mandatory entries, news organizations will choose one daily issue from each of two Monday-Saturday windows chosen at random: one from the first half of the year and one from the second half.
This decision was made to make the contest more accessible in a changing environment where an increasing number of newspapers are publishing as few as three days per week. It also avoids situations where two mandatory dates might be chosen from the same weekday, as happened with two mandatory Mondays in the most recent contest.
The first two mandatory dates were randomly chosen at the APSE Summer Conference banquet:
Daily: Jan. 5-10
Sunday: April 26
The other mandatory dates will be selected at the end of the year and revealed on Dec. 31.
Other contest changes:
* The Explanatory category will return to the Under-30 circulation division, with the Game Story category remaining for that division.
Projects will now be judged by link, including multimedia content rather than text only.
* Off-site judging will be utilized to judge one category from each division for preliminary judging (with final judging on site at the Winter Conference). This will allow judges who aren’t able to attend to participate.
* The Multimedia category will be split. Going forward, there will be a Multimedia category for all general multimedia content, as well as categories for Short Video (up to two minutes) and Long Video (more than two minutes).
* The Website contest will now be known as the Digital contest, and will include the mobile experience as well as websites, and will move to a year-round format.
