Not to mention that page views is a terrible way to weight relative resources to compete.

And using self-reported site stats is also a questionable metric for a contest.

The best measure is probably still print circ. Budgets and staff are often pegged to circ and circ is third-party verifiable.

Again, not to detract from the worthy winners, but you raise an important point.

Even though "more/less than 2 million unique page views/month" is weird language, I would have focused on PAGE VIEWS and not randomly inserted an imagined word such as "visitor" in there.

Still, your evidence from the sites in question supports your question very well, Lucas. I agree that the evidence seems to show that these folks are getting more than 200 million page views each month.

Here's how I look at who's producing this kind of work: We have a few big honkin' monoliths in the U.S.: NYT, WaPo, MSNBC.com, NBC, ABC, CBS, National Geographic -- and then you could say the LA Times and Chicago Tribune for good measure. They have huge resources.

Then we have some smaller power-players in multimedia journalism: Minneapolis Star Tribune, Roanoke, San Jose Mercury News (just in the past year or so), and it looks like The Palm Beach Post is climbing up fast.

The Sun-Sentinel, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Spokane, Dallas Morning News ... these guys also are not small. They do a fair amount of outstanding multimedia work.

Then there are dozens and dozen of little guys who probably don't stand a snowball's chance in hell for many of these awards.

What if these contests simply limited the number of pieces each company or organization is permitted to submit?

Why not ask them to pick their own best?

It sure would make the judging easier!

You all have raised an interesting question. What should contests make the cut-off point that determines which is a large and small site?

In this case, I don't know whether NPPA really meant to create an entire category for sites with fewer than 2 million page views. Only really small newspapers would qualify under that rule.

That's why I think it's reasonable that sites such as Roanoke and PalmBeachPost assumed NPPA meant unique users instead of page views when creating their cut off.

I think the 2 million unique user mark is a pretty good cut-off for contests. It keeps the really giant, usually national, news organizations separate from the more local sites. Self-reporting your stats and deciding a category isn't really a problem until someone cheats, which I don't think anyone has done.

It's not really the judges fault that these sites were retained in the super small category. I've judged several contests, and I take whatever entries I'm given. It's not my job to determine whether they even qualified, just whether they won. Somewhere along the way, though, this mix-up should have been caught.

Not sure there's really much that can be done about it now. The winners are announced and the judges have gone home.

Unfortunately, if the requirement had been the entrant site have fewer than 2 million uniques, then that would have opened it to an entirely different pool of entries. My guess is a bunch of newspapers would have entered the smaller category and competed against those who ended up winning.

That's not to say these other sites would have won. I've written before about the excellent quality of most of the winners.

Lucas, you've raised a great point. You may remember I made a similar argument about ONA and their awards structure last year here: http://tinyurl.com/nceht

I think your concern is very valid, especially as the vast gap grows between ‘the haves and the have-nots’ in journalism--companies that are constantly slitting throats and squeezing budgets/resources Vs. the big dogs with almost unlimited resources.

I don’t exactly have any perfect solutions. And I can’t explain what happened exactly on the entries for the PalmBeachPost.com because each photographer/producer submits their own work to contests and therefore select their own categories.

I do hope the industry soon establishes some more accurate, verifiable, open standards for online circulation. Ad info is suspect and the whole page view vs. unique user is a questionable standard (Compare Gmail’s intelligently designed site vs. MySpace’s page view inflating design. Or what happens if you get Dugg, Farked or Drudged sporadically) Maybe the industry could take a cure from blogs and introduce something like Sitemeter or any of the similar services to offer transparent numbers. There’s lots of exceptional work being done by people on shoestring budgets that deserves to be recognized.

Lucas,

The comments on this site point out just one of the issues the BOP committee has identified as things to change as the BOP Web contest matures. Our original intent was to do exactly what some of your commenters have suggested; carve out some space, away from the big, honkin’ sites (thanks Mindy!), for the small to medium market folks to showcase their stuff. Page views, unique page views, time on site; all of these are imperfect measures and we have been using them as guidelines rather than rigidly enforced rules.

As sites have become more popular and as web traffic has increased, our guidelines have become less and less reflective of reality; there are some big honkin’ sites that don't produce at the level of some of the smaller sites, while some smaller organizations are mustering resources to produce stunning work. Our contest has always been one that does not disqualify, but rather tries to find the proper home for entries the judges think may be in the wrong place, and while I agree that the 'numbers' may not add up exactly, the relative placement of organizations in this year's contest does.

That said, however, we have already decided that this contest needs a fresh look for 2008. Aside from size issues, we also need to address changes in the type of content being produced by news organizations and find a better formula for judging that allows the story-telling to take center stage rather than the technology or resources used to produce it. Additionally we have already started a process with the NPPA's News Video contest to figure out how to handle the increase in web video that is already overtaking both contests.

I hope we can get as many voices and viewpoints into the process on the front end so that what we come up with will make sense in the ever changing web environment. This contest itself is a testament to that change; last year it grew by 50%, this year by another 20%. Re-imaging the contest must also take a constant grow rate into account. How do we get to look at the best of the best from everyone and still keep this manageable?

It would be great if you and your readers could continue to be part of this conversation. I can continue to check in to this conversation on your site, but everyone should also feel free to email me directly at jenkinsk@washpost.com.

Keith W. Jenkins
BOP Web Contest Coordinator