Eligibility
All entries must have been published, posted or broadcast in an independent news outlet for the first time in 2022, with the following exceptions: EWA does accept series in which some of the articles were published during the 2021–2022 school year. However, a majority of the series’ pieces must have run in the calendar year 2022. One note of caution: Stories published or broadcast in 2021 that were recognized in last year’s EWA awards are ineligible for consideration in this year’s awards. Freelancers are eligible to apply.
Entrant qualifications
Entries may not include items created by non-journalists. (See EWA Bylaws, Article II, Section 1.1, to clarify entrants’ eligibility to be considered journalists). All entrants must have met these eligibility requirements at the time the entry was produced. Officers and members of the Board of Directors of the Education Writers Association may enter but are not eligible to win cash awards in the competition.
Deadline
All entries must be completed by Jan. 9, 2023 at 6 p.m. Eastern. Category winners and finalists will be announced during late spring 2023. Please also note that we now have a two-tiered fee structure. If you submit by Dec. 31, 2022, you pay $50 per entry as a member or $100 as a nonmember. Fees increase to $75 per entry Jan. 1-9, 2023 for members and to $125 for nonmembers. (Membership is free.)
Categories
For 2022, EWA will accept submissions in seven categories and the Eddie: Audio Storytelling, Beat Reporting, Collaborations, Features, Investigative Reporting & Public Service, News, Visual Storytelling and the Eddie Prize. For more details, click on our Categories page.
Maximum number of stories
The maximum number of stories per entry in every category, except beat reporting, is four. If you are entering beat reporting, the maximum per entry is five. You can enter up to one hour maximum of audio or visual content.
Newsroom size
For all, except the Eddie Prize and the new Collaborations category, you must enter in the newsroom size division appropriate for your newsroom. To calculate your newsroom size, count the number of all editorial “full-time equivalent” employees, including reporters, editors, designers, online producers and multimedia content producers, such as photographers, data analysts and videographers during the time period the entered work was produced. (Two half-time editors would count as one FTE.) For additional specifics, check out our Awards FAQs.
Collaborations
This is the first time EWA has offered a Collaborations category. This category honors partnerships among media organizations to produce high-quality coverage of an issue or story. Entrants should demonstrate how each partner contributed to the collaboration and offered essential value to the project. If the collaboration is between a national outlet and a local one, for example, then the local outlet might bring local voice and insight to the collaboration while the national partner might bring its deeper resources to provide valuable data analysis.
Cover letter
Each entry must include a cover letter that describes the entry’s development and impact, if any. Also, supply all relevant URLs for the entry. (Suggestion: Limit the cover letter’s narrative portion to a single page.)
If a password is needed to access the content, supply the necessary details in the cover letter or upload PDFs of your work. For the Collaborations category, EWA requests submission letters list all outlets that participated in the production and/or publication of the entry.
Entry formats
Judges may disqualify any entry that does not adhere to the rules or that is submitted in a form that is difficult to read, listen to or view (broken links, PDFs in which the font is too small, a password for the paywall that doesn’t work, etc.). All audio and video entries must state total run times (that include the host introduction) in the cover letter and should include transcripts. Visual entries must be in the form of URLs, JPEGs, MOVs, MPEGs, MP4s, PNGs or WMVs. Audio entries must be in the form of a URL (preferred), MP3 or WAV.
Repeat content
Any item submitted in one category may NOT be submitted in a second category, except as part of a beat reporting entry and/or an entry for the Eddie Prize. A beat entry cannot include more than one story from another individual category entry. For instance, two of three stories entered into the News category cannot be submitted to Beat.
Fees
Entries must be paid in full by 6 p.m. Eastern on Jan. 9, 2023 in order to be judged. Fees for members are $50 per entry until Dec. 31, 2022 at 11:59 p.m., and then $75 Jan. 1, 2023 to Jan. 9, 2023. For nonmembers, fees are $100 per entry until Dec. 31, 2022, and then $125 from Jan. 1, 2023 to Jan. 9, 2023. Pay online when submitting.
Category classification
EWA staff or Awards judges may move an entry from one category to another if they determine it is wrongly classified. Our category page has more specifics.
Judging
Judges reserve the right to forgo awarding prizes in categories they determine have no suitable winners.
Promotion
When you enter any work into EWA’s National Awards for Education Reporting, you are granting us the right to publish excerpts of and promote what you submit — photos, text, videos, etc. — on EWA’s website and through our social media platforms. We do this to highlight the caliber and importance of entries, finalists and winners.
