Brennan Smith, Amy Lewis, Scott Sommerdorf and Kevin Winters Morriss, of the Salt Lake Tribune won first place in the Associated Press Sports Editors 2015 contest in multimedia for the 75-175,000 circulation category.
The team won for “All Access Pass: How Utah’s top sports teams prepare to play.” The interactive piece went inside every major team, from college to pro, to show the behind-the-scenes preparation.
Smith, Lewis, Sommerdorf and Winters Morriss will be presented a first-place plaque at the 2016 APSE banquet. The banquet and awards dinner concludes the APSE Conference June 22-25 at The Omni in Charlotte, N.C.
The Salt Lake Tribune collected four of the six first-place votes and finished with 15 points. Finishing second was Kyle Fredrickson, Jenni Carlson, Tim Money, Paige Dillard, Richard Hall, Erik Horne, Bryan Terry, Steve Sisney and Chris Landsberger of The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), who finished with 11 points. Jeff Greer and Jesse Hazel, of the The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), finished with 10 points.
Sports editors in the 75-175,000 category submitted 13 entries. The contest is open to APSE members. Click here to join.
Contest chair Tommy Deas 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 late February and early March, preliminary judges at the APSE Winter Conference at Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., selected a top three, with each judge ranking the entries in order from 1 to 3 separately on a secret ballot. Entries were given 3 points for a first-place vote, 2 points for second and 1 point for third place. The final three were given to a second judging group, which ranked the entries 1-3 in the same fashion. The winner and final rankings are determined by tallying the ballots.
This year, the multimedia category excluded video as that moved into two separate categories. Multimedia includes interactive graphics, audio, slideshows or combinations thereof, or anything else that falls under the broad description of multimedia other than simple videos. Entries were judged, foremost, on the strength of storytelling. Each news organization was limited to two entry.
The top three are listed below with links to writers’ Twitter pages, APSE member websites and winning entries:
- Brennan Smith, Amy Lewis, Scott Sommerdorf and Kevin Winters Morriss, The Salt Lake Tribune, four first-place votes, 15 points
ALL ACCESS PASS: How Utah’s top sports teams prepare to play
- Kyle Fredrickson, Jenni Carlson, Tim Money, Paige Dillard, Richard Hall, Erik Horne, Bryan Terry, Steve Sisney and Chris Landsberger, The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), one first-place vote, 11 points
The Play That Changed It All: No Sooner felt the weight of it more than Bob Stoops
Oklahoma State football: An oral history of The Return
The Non-Fiction Writers podcast: Talking Bedlam 2014 and ‘The Play That Changed It All, Part 2’
- Jeff Greer and Jesse Hazel, The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), one first-place vote, 10 points
