By Greg Smith
ATHENS, OH (March 29, 2007) – Judging for NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism 2007 Picture Editing division proceeded steadily today in a crowded conference room of Ohio University’s new John Calhoun Baker Student Center.
By late afternoon, a half-dozen categories had been reviewed, with students sitting beside judges to offer technical assistance. Most observers agreed this second competition featuring electronic Acrobat .PDF files, rather than printed news pages, drew strong entries. And there were few technical glitches.
NPPA’s Best Of Photojournalism 2007 competition is sponsored this year by Canon and Avid.
“There’s so much strong content, that it’s difficult to get down to the final five or six edits,” explained John Glenn, one of the NPPA judges and an associate editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They’re all good, but there are different degrees of good.”
Fellow judge Bonnie Jo Mount, an assistant professor at Hampton University, noted the collaboration involved in making the entries shine. “I’m really impressed,” she said. “So far all the categories seem consistently strong.”
Judging of the Best Of Photojournalism 2007 Picture Editing division runs from March 29 through March 31 at Ohio University, the editing division’s host site and a returning contest sponsor, under the coordination of BOP committee members Terry Eiler and Stan Alost. Eiler is the director of OU’s School of Visual Communication (VisCom), and Alost is a VisCom associate professor.
Other judges for the Picture Editing division of this year’s Best Of Photojournalism contest include Elizabeth Cheng Krist, a illustrations editor for National Geographic magazine; Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist William D. Snyder, the former director of photography for The Dallas Morning News; and freelance photojournalist Bob Sacha of New York City, a Knight Fellow at Ohio University, who is serving as an alternative judge.
In addition to Canon and Avid, NPPA’s Best Of Photojournalism 2007 competition is also sponsored by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, FL; Hesketh.com; Ibiblio.org; Camera Bits; Think Tank Photo; and MerlinOne.
For more information or to ask questions please contact Best Of Photojournalism 2007 contest coordinator Thomas Kenniff at contests@nppa.org.
Read an earlier story about last week's Still Photography judging.
