Well, the results have been announced so I am now somewhat at liberty to discuss my thoughts on the submissions to the RSS Excellence in Statistical Journalism awards [http://www.statslife.org.uk/news/2324-rss-journalism-awards-2015-winners-announced]. There were some very worthy winners!
The Good:
Some of the submissions were excellent; well-pitched to their target audience, of appropriate length and detail and could become really good teaching examples. A slight down-side to this was the difficulty in placing submissions in the most appropriate categories: one of the lessons learned from the judging point of view is to be stricter on having those submitting the pieces to select one and only one category. One piece that I really enjoyed, but that didn’t earn a prize, was from More or Less. It faced tough competition in its category, and was slightly hampered by not exactly “fitting” the categories. Also, examples of really good practice was the provision of supporting material: background to how the data was sourced and the terms and conditions applied to the data.
The Bad:
Pieces that were much too long. Although the rules stated that longer pieces could be submitted by agreement, submitting something more than ten times the standard limit that could not be reasonably be expected to engage a typical reader. Why were these bad? In general they tried to tell too many stories rather than just a concentrating on telling the story of a single issue well.
The Ugly:
Graphs! Seriously there were some really bad graphs. Doughnut plots were especially poor – even worse than pie charts. The poor use of graphs was particularly disappointing given that many of the submissions were working with graphics departments. In other graphs, the kitchen sink was thrown into the process. They could do well with reading Tufte’s “Principles of Graphical Excellence”. While I wouldn’t recommend them to follow the recommendations to the letter, understanding that simplicity and clarity of graphs is important.
And Finally:
The judging process itself was quite efficient; with judges ranking submissions in individual categories. Then, before the main judging day, those who were involved in the final judging process were then sent all the pieces that had been shortlisted. This allowed for very quick decisions to be made in some categories, and time for interesting discussions on the pieces in other cases.
To be decided 