2010 Marconi Awards

[Scott Fybush]

Garrett Wollman wrote:

> <<On Sat, 2 Oct 2010 15:39:55 -0400, "Dan.Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net> said:
> 
>> an NAB-member company. When CBS rejoined the NAB, it strongly
>> encouraged the nomination of its stations for Marconis. I have the
>> feeling that stations may be allowed to nominate themselves. That
>> sounds horrible, but it isn't; it seems to be commonplace for awards
>> given to members of trade associations.
> 
> I don't know about the Marconis, but many industry awards are made on
> the basis of presentations created by stations or producers which are
> supposed to highlight their best work; the results are then judged by
> a panel of experts in the field.  That's how all the journalism awards
> are done, for example.  I suppose now there are probably awards for
> multimedia journalism that include both broadcast and Web content.

Dan and Garrett are both correct.

One of my duties when I was at WBZ was the preparation of contest 
entries. At least in my time there, we routinely entered several 
journalism contests, in particular the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow awards and 
the Associated Press awards. We also entered the Marconi competition for 
several years, and we won the Major Market Station of the Year Marconi 
in, if memory serves, 1995.

We never won the "Legendary Station" Marconi despite several entries, so 
it's nice to see WBZ winning that award now.

In the case of the RTNDA and AP awards, it was common for entrants to 
also serve as judges. We'd send off our tapes and entry forms, which 
would be sent off to stations in other states, and in return we'd get a 
box of tapes and entry forms from Pennsylvania or Iowa or California or 
wherever to judge.

Those competitions never seemed very political to me; the Marconis, on 
the other hand, always felt like they had a political edge to them. It 
seems as though the "hometown station" in whatever city is hosting the 
convention often has an edge at awards time - this year, for instance, 
the Radio Show was in DC and WTOP won both "Major Market" and "All-News" 
Marconis.

And yes, the Marconis are limited to NAB member stations in good standing:

http://www.nab.org/forms/marconi/marconiform.asp

This indeed eliminated a lot of stations from consideration during the 
years when CBS and ABC were out of NAB. It was odd to have an "Oldies 
Station" category without CBS-FM, WODS, KRTH and WOGL, for instance, or 
an "All-News" category without WCBS, WINS, KYW, WBBM, KNX, KCBS or WBZ.

s