Interested in volunteering to be a judge? You can register directly on RTDNA Canada’s Award site now: https://rtdnaawards.com/judges
We want to expand and diversify our judging pool by recruiting different levels of experience; different skill sets; and a wider number of news entities including, but not limited to, editors, directors, photojournalists, employees at smaller news organizations or digital news entities, professors at post-secondary journalism schools, ex-journalists now working in other industries, retired journalists, producers, assignment editors, live co-ordinators, and chase producers.
If you have any questions, please contact us at awards@rtdnacanada.com
Members of RTDNA Canada appreciate the valuable contribution you make to improve broadcast and digital journalism by accepting the position of judging these prestigious awards. Thank you!
Awards Committee, RTDNA Canada
Karen Mitchell – Awards Chair
Mieke Anderson
Colleen Schmidt
Note: The information below, Judging Guidelines (Download the PDF version), Judging Dates and Deadlines, Judging Criteria and Rules, Judging Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality, and Awards Categories: Regional and National, will help answer questions that might arise while you are engaged in the judging process.
Click the button below to download / print the PDF version of the Judges Procedure and Criteria.
IMPORTANT DATES:
Friday, March 4, 2022 – Judges informed of their panel assignments
Judging: Regional and National Awards – March 7 to March 18
Round 1 – OPEN 8:00 am (ET) Monday, March 7, 2022
Round 1 – CLOSED 8:00 pm (ET) Friday, March 18, 2022 – Round 1 judging closed unless tie break scoring is required
Tie break – in the event of a tie, the category needs to be rescored. You have five days to break the tie – Deadline is Friday, March 25 @ 8:00pm (ET)
Judging: Best Canadian Local News Awards – March 31 to April 8
Round 2 – OPEN 8:00 am (ET) Thursday, March 31, 2022
Round 2 – CLOSED 8:00 pm (ET) Friday, April 8 – Round 2 judging closed unless tie break scoring is required
Tie break – in the event of a tie, the category needs to be rescored. FIRM deadline is Thursday, April 14 @ 8:00pm (ET) before Easter weekend.
May 4, 2022 – Regional Award finalists announced
May 26, 2022 – Regional Award winners announced – East, Central, Prairies, West
June 8, 2022 – National and Best Canadian Local News Award finalists announced
June 2022 – National and Best Canadian Local News Award winners announced at RTDNA Canada Awards Gala
RTDNA Canada’s judges come from a wide variety of backgrounds and affiliations – ranging from people working at small, private, news organizations to large networks, to faculty of journalism programs. As many Canadian journalists work for a handful of large employers, many of our judges come from large organizations in this country’s very concentrated media landscape.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
We have taken certain measures to minimize conflict of interest. For example, individuals are assigned to judge entries that originate in other regions of the country. Similarly, journalists who work at the National level are asked to judge Regional entries and vice versa.
From time to time, a judge will flag us about a potential conflict of interest, and we will rule whether to assign them elsewhere or leave them as assigned. We trust in the professionalism of judges to vote for excellence even if an entry was submitted by the “competition.” Looking at our former judges and their track record, we would say that our trust is well placed.
We have also created a buffer in that all judging is done independently – aside from rare occurrences when a tie needs to be broken. For this reason, we do not release the names of our judges.
CONFIDENTIALITY
To ensure the confidentiality of members’ submissions and maintain the integrity of the awards, we ask you to keep the information assigned to you private.
Specifically, you undertake to:
1. Respect the confidential nature of all submissions and not disclose information in submissions, in any way whatsoever, to third parties;
2. Use such information as is disclosed to you only for the express purpose of scoring submissions assigned to you, and for no other purpose.
If you have any questions or concerns or would like to flag a potential conflict of interest, please contact us at awards@rtdnacanada.com.
We are also sensitive to Canada’s employment climate and that some of the country’s premier journalists have found their job status has changed – sometimes of their own choice, sometimes not. Consequently, some of our judges are self-employed and others have taken a break from their retirement to judge for us. Their employment status has not diminished their ability to judge journalistic excellence.
We are beholden to all our judges – regional, national, faculty, freelance and retired – for the time and expertise that they donate to us annually!
There would be no RTDNA Canada Awards without you.