2018 CJA Award Entries
Subsequent to my recent post, 2018 CJA Awards Announcement (May 2018), the Chess Journalists of America (CJA) have listed entries for the awards on their page Chess Journalism | Entries. The page is a bit of a mishmash -- it groups the entries according to the means by which they were submitted -- but all entries are combined in an Excel file that heads the page.
In my favorite category, 'Best Chess Blog', there is one entry which is in fact a single post rather than an entire blog. Last year there were no entries at all, and no award since 2015, so we can be thankful for small things. In my second favorite category, 'Best Chess Art', there are five entries, of which the four CL/CK covers are shown below.
Top row:
CL October 2017, David Chesnutt;
CL December 2017, Lorelei;
CK December 2017, Elif Balta Parks
Bottom row:
CL April 2018, Paul Dickinson
(CL: Chess Life, CK: Chess Life Kids)
The entry in the bottom row is a two-page cover, and reminds me of the technique I flagged recently in An 1886 Photoshopped Illustration (May 2018). The fifth entry in the category, 'Chestoons Drawn by Brian Berger - NW Chess', can be found via NWC Magazine Back Issues.
Many of the other categories have ten or more entries. The top of every page on the CJA site currently says,
Anyone can nominate and people are encouraged to nominate their own work. Quite often this is the only way to gain meaningful recognition for hard work and is not a conflict of interest. Nominations are not votes, but the way to make the judges aware of quality work. Only judges get to vote on the entries.
The winners will probably be announced at the 'Annual Workshop and Business Meeting', probably in early August. The report of last year's meeting, 2017 Minutes (chessjournalism.org), doesn't mention when or where it was held.
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1 comment:
The CJA does not have its own major platform for publicizing its winners.
In contrast, when ChessCafe.com was free, it had a large quantity of visitors, and it enabled its visitors to vote for chess book of the year. AND ChessCafe could then use its own webpages to publicize the winner.
Due to the large quantity of visitors and voters, chess book companies were eager to paint a badge on the cover trumpeting - "ChessCafe Best Chess Book for 2010!".
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ChessPub.com has an annual Best Openings Chess Book of the Year voting, but the quantity of visitors is too small for it to gain any mindshare beyond the ChessPub.com clientele.
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Overall it is unfortunate that there is not broadly recognized and broadly publicized organization that bestows and prestigious award for chess book of the year.
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GeneM , 2018/07/14
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