Dave Birkett, Ryan Ford, Chris Thomas and Roman Padilla of the Detroit Free Press won first place in the Associated Press Sports Editors 2019 contest in Multimedia for the A Division.
They will be presented a first-place plaque at the 2020 APSE Summer Conference Banquet at The Alexander Hotel in Indianapolis on June 27.
The Free Press team edged a second-place tie between Ben Golliver, Armand Emamdomeh, Virginia Singarayar and Tomasz Usyk of The Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff.
Sports editors in the A Division submitted 38 multimedia entries. The contest is open to APSE members. Click here to join.
Contest chair Lisa Wilson and fellow APSE officers Todd M. Adams, Gary Potosky and Dan Spears prepared the entries. Sports editors in the A Division entered 44 videos.
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.
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. Visual and auditory quality was considered.
The top 10 is listed below with links to the winning entries.
1. Dave Birkett, Ryan Ford, Chris Thomas, Ramon Padilla, Detroit Free Press, 44 points, 2 first-place votes
T2. Staff, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 43 points
T2. Ben Golliver, Armand Emamdomeh, Virginia Singarayar, Tomasz Usyk, The Washington Post, 43 points, 1 first-place vote
4. Staff, ESPN.com, 36 points, 1 first-place vote
5. Staff, ESPN.com, 35 points, 1 first-place vote
6. Brad Townsend, Damon Marx, John Hancock, Michael Hogue, Jose Rodriguez, The Dallas Morning News, 34 points
7. Staff, The Arizona Republic, 33 points, 1 first-place vote
8. TJ Furman, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 points
9. Staff (The Lead Podcast), The Athletic, 19 points
10. Matt Stanmyre, NJ Advance Media, 18 points
