The Society for News Design has announced the winners of its annual awards.
For the uninitiated, the Society for News Design is the big newspaper design group and winning one of their awards is a badge of the highest honour for newspaper designers.
Or, at least it would be if they were more selective. The SND gives out almost a thousand awards each year, and considering there are 10,725 entries from 346 newspapers, that means that each entry has a one in ten shot of winning an award, and each newspaper should get three awards on average just for showing up.
Perhaps for that reason, the number of newspapers participating in this exercise has dropped. Notably missing from the list below is the Globe and Mail, for example.
Still, it’s seen as a penis-measuring contest, so let’s whip out those rulers. The 108 awards given to Canadian publications break down as follows:
- National Post: 56 (including two gold medals)
- La Presse: 32
- Toronto Star: 14
- Montreal Gazette: 4
- Guelph Mercury: 1
- Swerve Magazine (Calgary Herald): 1
You can seee a full list of winners by searching the database (there’s too many of them to list all on one page, after all). You’ll probably also see special pages devoted to SND wins in the above publications. Updated with links to self-laudatory stories in the four multiple-award-winning papers.
I realize we’re probably talking about awards like “Best Use of a Serif Typeface in a Non-Front Page Headline”, and “Most Dynamic Bar Chart, Weekend Business Section”…
…but somehow I can’t help but feel that the name “Society for News Design” sounds like some evil Masonic organization, created to mould public opinion and steer democracy to some (intelligently?) designed path. Beware the tentacles of the SND, and its 346 mouthpieces!
Is it just me? =)
The Gazette (and its Canada.com siblings) have at least one big fat annoying flaw with their new design that they launched recently — forced resize of your browser.
ARRRGH! That is so retrograde! And pointless!
If I follow a link to a Montreal Gazette story, my browser (and all 17 tabs that are open) gets resized to the arbitrary size that some idiot designer has decided it should be. This is wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels, and right on absolutely zero levels. Web designers stopped doing that in 2002, so why the &^%% is the Gazette doing it now?
Wow, thanks for pointing out the numbers. I wasn’t aware of this. Makes it all a tad bit less prestigious…
I’m beginning to wonder if the Aspers looming financial downfall is one of those things that you’re not free to write about? I for one will shed not one tear when and if they’re gone as controlling shareholders of the Canwest empire.
I’ve linked to the Globe and Mail story about Canwest in the sidebar, but really that’s all the news there is right now. Rest assured if my company goes bankrupt I’ll mention it somewhere.
To be fair, Leonard Asper says the situation is exaggerated and that Canwest is very profitable. He thinks he can pull the company out of this debt problem.
We’ll see who’s right soon.
One of the reasons I despise La Presse is their often self-congratulatory tone in their own articles letting us know how great thet are. Philippe Cantin’s article in todays La Presse is a prime example of this, almost made me vomit.
In a recent report on its financial results, the only bright spot in terms of revenue was their crop of specialty channels, which are cash cows thanks to generally captive consumers like you and me. And yet it seems like these very properties are being shopped around now as “non-core” assets. At least that’s the case for The Score, a channel that I would have thought has excellent revenue growth potential, now that the CRTC has wisely loosened some of the programming restrictions around sports networks.
I haven’t heard anything saying Canwest is shopping its cable networks. It’s the secondary broadcast network that they’ve deemed “non-core” and are trying to find a buyer for.
That’s what I’d understood, as well. But see yesterday’s G&M story, where it sounds like they may be shopping the lucrative specialty assets around, too:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090221.RCANWEST21/TPStory/Business
I actually hadn’t seen that story. Canwest isn’t shopping the channels though. Some bankers are speculating about what might happen if Canwest declares bankruptcy and is forced to sell its assets.
Canwest does unload The Score, netting only $10 million in return, for below what the stock was trading at, too:
http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090225.wrcanwest0225/BNStory/Business/home