Behind the Headlines

By Paula Wethington / paula@monroenews.com

Last fall, my daughter Karolyn was a speaker for an awards program. Specifically, as one of the area’s Gold Award Girl Scouts in the class of 2007, she was asked to give a speech about her scouting experiences during the Huron Valley Girl Scout Council’s annual Women of Distinction awards luncheon in September.

I made arrangements to get her from her college campus in South Bend to Ann Arbor on the appointed date, and the two of us attended the luncheon.

Before lunch, my daughter and Jennifer Guerra from Michigan Public Radio, who served as mistress of ceremonies, went over their presentation notes. Various dignitaries, some of whom we had met previously, and some we knew only by name, came by to say hello.

After the program, I told my daughter it would be polite, since she was a speaker, to give personal congratulations to each of the winners. So we made our rounds through the room.

Keep in mind my daughter was the only one in the room wearing a youth Girl Scout uniform and had already given her remarks to the audience. As a result, she was easy to pick out in a crowd.

And yet, with the rush of friends, relatives and corporate sponsors to the award winners, we had to wait quite a bit for our turn to give remarks and a handshake to each of the honorees. “Congratulations on your award, it was nice to meet you,” … and that’s about all we were able to manage.

But we accomplished our goal of personally greeting all four honorees before everyone departed.

Now what does this story have to do with the business of being a reporter?

Well, this is a busy time of year for awards programs in Monroe County. And the newsroom does get a lot of requests from the sponsoring groups to “please send a reporter or photographer to our awards event.” I found one such query in my e-mail when I arrived this morning.

But what I have noticed as a reporter who is assigned to cover at least one awards program a year is exactly what I noticed as a guest at the Women of Distinction program:

Award honorees barely have time for more than one interview question or to pose for a good photo when they are being showered in quick succession with trophies, gifts, flowers, handshakes, autograph requests, etc. from relatives, friends, corporate sponsors and guests. Example: I was lucky to get three sentences for a newspaper story out of Miss Monroe County Rachel McCleery on the night she received her crown in August, and the pageant contestants had been told in advance that the newspaper would want quotes from the winner that night!

That’s why it usually works best for the award committees handle the situation this way: the committee sends a photo of each of the honorees or a list of their names, along with a description of the award and how or why the person met the credentials to The Monroe Evening News.

This can be done before the event, as part of the “tickets are available for …” announcement; or it can be done soon after the event, which is appropriate in cases of a surprise award.

Perhaps the newspaper staff will decide to do more of a feature story than an announcement on the honoree, either before or after the formal presentations take place. But for the best results on such a write-up or photo, as a reporter, I would want to set up that appointment for when the honoree has a bit more time than the typical awards program permits.