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Texas TV/Attention Recent Katie Award Winners

F

FilioScotia

Any reporter -- print and electronic -- who has won a Katie Award from the Dallas Press Club in the past several years -- will not be happy to know that the award could be meaningless. It turns out that the press club President is something of a fraud who apparently never sent the news entries out of state as required, and did the judging herself. She's given herself ten Katies in the past four years, including four just this past year. Absolutely true. Here's the story, which I cut and pasted out of the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

Press club award inquiry expanding
JEFF CARLTON THE Associated Press

DALLAS — A scandal ensnaring one of the Southwest's top journalism awards may extend back two more years than previously thought, officials with The Press Club of Dallas said Monday. The entries for the 2006 Katie Awards apparently never went before judges, and the competitions from 2004 and 2005 are also under investigation, club President Tom Stewart said.

Stewart said he believes that the competitions might have been rigged by the club's former leader, who has won 10 Katies in the past four years and has a criminal history of passing bad checks and a personal history of erratic behavior.

Former press club president Elizabeth Albanese was fired Saturday — after the scandal became public — from her job as vice president of communications for First Southwest Co., an investment banking firm in Dallas, the company's general counsel said Monday.

http://www.star-telegram.com/251/story/78964.html

[EDIT]



[EDIT-post truncated because originating material is copyprotected. Unauthorized use of copyrighted content is in violation of Radio-Info's TOS.]
 
Yes this scandal developed last friday and it may impact the2005 awards. No one did abackground check on thsi person. Over 350 awards are in doubt.
 
It's a shame to see The Press Club and the passed years winners awards tarnished.

Hopefully the membership and in particular the veteran winners of years past will get involved to insure that one person cannot affect the outcome of a such a vote. I beleive full involvement of the membership will do a lot to insure credibility in the future.

(Disclaimer -- The above is just my opinion. I am a viewer you don't give awards for watching)
 
It's very simple: all of these types of awards are nearly meaningless. Emmy is better, but it's not great. Same goes for AP. You get some reporters, interns and others gathered in a conference room to watch tape and pass judgement. That's how it works. Pizza and soft drinks are usually involved. We're not talking about a blue-ribbon panel of journalistic greats carefully watching each of the entries.

I'm not surprised something like this happened with the Katies. I suspect a real investigation will find that this goes back years and involves more than just this one woman who's currently under investigation.
 
Not really. The Judges are Journalism professors from well known and prestigous colleges and universities respective schools of journalism. Some may meet to discuss, BUT they are seperated over many hundreds of miles ,EXCEPT FOR THIS PAST YEAR evidently.So they may have a digornio's and the oven and a beer ,but that doesn't mean their judging is blase'.
 
In defense of judges

I and several others in my news department frequently judge Press Club radio news entries from Chicago, Ohio, South Dakota and several other states. (Our News Director is active with the Houston Press Club, so she's always walking in with a box of entries from somewhere and having us judge them in our spare time.)

Speaking just for us, we take the judging seriously. We really listen to all the entries, critique them and pick the winners in a variety of categories. Houston Press Club contest entries go out to stations in other states, where WE HOPE they take the task as seriously as we.

My one experience with the Dallas Katies was in 2000, when I won a radio Katie for political reporting. I was very surprised when I learned I had won, because I really didn't think the story was all that exceptional or even noteworthy. Still don't.

Now I've learned that the woman responsible for the current mess at the Dallas Press Club had gone to work there the year before. While I have no reason to question the validity of my Katie, I'll send it back to them in a heart beat if they tell me that the 2000 awards are also under suspicion.
 
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