Smedia Nominations

Spectator#1

This years nominations seem a little unrepresentative of the actual writers from UCD this year, so far anyway. Anyone feel the same?

Riamfada

havnt seen it yet. Have you the list at all?

Mr.Nice Guy

They should let us Boardsies be up for awards. :cool:

zap

list is nowhere near complete

Dave!

What is this?

dajaffa

They're the student media awards, sponsored by oxygen.ie. The likes of the observer, tribune and belfield fm are going for them. The observer usually pick up an award or two.

Spectator#1

Here's the URL, whoever said that is right, it is nowhere near complete. However, the people who were nominated I don't feel deserved it at all. For instance, 'Features Editor Eleanor Cunningham' for the Observer wrote po-faced and generally mis-informed articles all year and managed two nominations. Check out her feature on Aspergers and genius if you don't believe me.

HappyCrackHead

The Tribune has been QUALITY this year, put the observer to shame. To be honest i was hearing rumours all year about how the Observer was crying out for staff, but their stand during refreshers day was empty. They have a couple of good writers but... a lot of it is trash. (sorry guys). I remember they recycled their quotes of the week from a pervious issue in march.

Smedias tend to be a bit iffy when it comes to awarding for radio. Considering several stations script and prerecord all their work unlike BFM... In fact we, BFM, are often the total opposite. I personally believe in "seat-of-the-pants" radio production/presentation.

singingstranger

Spectator#1 wrote:

For instance, 'Features Editor Eleanor Cunningham' for the Observer wrote po-faced and generally mis-informed articles all year and managed two nominations. Check out her feature on Aspergers and genius if you don't believe me.

Meanwhile, your old reliable, the guy-who-writes-pieces-about-how-cosmetically-brilliant-Anto-Kelly-is-to-order (as well as being a regular album reviewer, and more recently, an interviewer, film reviewer and feature writer) was overlooked for shortlisting in his two categories. Sob.

dajaffa

Yeah, the radio one's are a bit stingy. There's one for best production, which is basically a documentary which is a bit random really.
And the entry for the news show award is sending in a cd of a show , which is a slight disadvantage to BFm who do everything live. Most colleges just pre-record stuff, which makes a show crap at the time it you're listening to it, but might sound better when the judges listen to it, cause everyone's is out of date anyway.

What I mean is, if a story breaks at 4pm, it can be on BFm at 5pm, wheras other college stations will have pre-recorded their show that day, and not do it til a few days later, but their report may be of better quality, even though it's well out of date...

hullaballoo

These awards are generally lacking in any real analysis. You get awards based on how run-of-the-mill your journalism is. They don't like anything fresh and new. It seems like they are afraid to award anyone who could potentially show them up themselves.

I'm not saying this because I'm bitter that I didn't win an award last year, oh no. I have enough faith in my own unrivalled writing skills not to be dismayed by an award ceremony frought with amateur writers who could not propound a decent opinion between them. No, my belief in my own right hand is well established. I don't even use a sock.

What I couldn't believe of last year's awards is that the best features article I have ever read anywhere, and the best editing job both went unrewarded. The Tribune was a great newspaper last year, and was generally neutral as opposed to predominantly left-wing. There are some fantastic writers in there, Colin Gleeson in particular.

Their design editor, one Mr Simon Ward also does a fantastic job. I pooh-pooh the Smedias. Pooh-pooh.

Stargal

The Tribune has really improved this year - pity there isn't an award to recognise that!

hullaballoo

Hmmm, as far as I know there actually is such a category and it hasn't been shortlisted yet. Perhaps I'm wrong on that, but I seem to remember The Tribune winning it for the 2003/2004 year.

Stargal

Maybe they used to have that award, but it hasn't been around for the past two years anyway.

The full shortlist should be out by tomorrow evening - but they did say that it would be out last Wednesday/Thursday so I'm not really taking that as a given...

hullaballoo

Well, as I said I could be wrong. Sure we'll see what other nominations there are.

singingstranger

UCD won six different awards:

Tribune's Simon Ward for Layout & Design

Observer won Newspaper Of The Year
Observer's Billy Jones won Feature Writer (News & Current Affairs)
Alan Burns for Sports Writer
Sorcha Nic Mhathúna for Journalist of the Year

Also a gong for John Holten for his short story Germania.

Congrats to all involved!

hullaballoo

Ward's design was very impressive alright, so I'm not too surprised by that one. I still think it's a farce though.

Vorsprung

Get there Burnsie!!!!

Samos

HappyCrackHead wrote:

I remember they recycled their quotes of the week from a pervious issue in march.

That was due to a printing error, where two pages from the previous month's edition were wrongly inserted. They both had similar dates like February 7 and March 7 so it wasn't intentional. The layout of the Observer could do with a bit of improvement though...