09 August 2022

2022 CJA Awards - Part 1

A few weeks ago we looked at 2022 CJA Award Entries (July 2022), and now we can look at the final awards. Last year I split the discussion into 'Part 1' and 'Part 2' -- see the 2022 kickoff post 2022 CJA Awards Announcement (May 2022) for background and links. NB: In case you haven't been following the series, the acronym CJA stands for Chess Journalists of America.

I haven't seen an announcement that the 2022 awards are available, but they can be found at 2022 CJA Awards Winners (chessjournalism.org). Between the time I noticed that the awards were available and the time I started to write this post, that 'Winners' page changed, so I have two copies of the list of winners. The chart below, which echoes the post '2021 Part 1', is based on the second of those lists.

The first point to notice is that the number of awards increased from 81 in 2021 to an even 100 in 2022. The second point is that the category 'Best Online and Social Media' has overtaken 'Best Print Articles' for the most awards. In the '2022 Entries' post, I predicted,

I expect we'll see many award winners listed '1st/2nd Equal' or 'Honorable Mention'.

It wasn't a tough call, because the CJA often grants multiple awards in competitive topics. This year they saw increases for each of their 'Winner', 'Co-winner', and 'Honorable Mention' awards.

Last year I counted the number of awards for different organizations, where Chess Life was at the top of the list. This year it's not so easy to make that count. Instead I counted topics with more than one award, shown on the right of the chart. There were nine topics with three or more awards and 18 topics with two awards, leaving 33 with a single award.

I'll be back later with 'Part 2' of this post. There is so much to discuss this year that I might even squeeze out a 'Part 3'.

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