ASBPE Now Accepting Call for Entries for 2008 Awards

It's that time of year again: time for the Annual American Society of Business Publication Editors Awards.

Affectionately known as the Azbee's, this year's award form can be downloaded from the ASBPE website.

The deadline for entries is February 15, 2008.

New to this year's competition, entrants can submit layouts and articles electronically. Be sure to set your RSS feed to this blog or our National blog for up-to-date information on the entry process.

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Posted by Erin on Saturday, December 29, 2007 @ 10:08 AM
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ASBPE offers webinar to Trade Press Editors: Winning Editorial Awards

Join ASBPE Awards of Excellence winners Boyce Thompson of Hanley Wood and Don Tennant of IDG as they explain in a free webinar how they prepare for editorial awards.

On Friday, December 14th, you can log in and learn:

  • How and why the editors chose the articles they entered
  • What the awards have meant to the winners’ careers and to their publications
  • How to build award potential into the articles you write and edit
  • How to apply the standards of editorial competitions to your day-to-day work

Webinar Details:
When: Friday, December 14th, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST.
Where: Your computer. A web conference dial-in number and access code is required, and will be provided to registrants in a subsequent e-mail.
How to attend: To reserve your place, email b2beditor@gmail.com to obtain a registration form.

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Posted by Erin on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 @ 5:22 PM
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February 29, 2008: ASBPE Chicago to host Winter Workshop

Should magazines blog?
How can you align your online brand with your print brand?
Will Second Life breath new life into your ideas?

ASBPE Chicago hopes to answer these questions and more as we present "Down and Dirty with Digital Media" on February 29, 2008.

We'll have official sign-up in the next month; however, this is a workshop you won't want to miss and space is limited.

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Posted by Erin on Saturday, December 8, 2007 @ 5:38 PM
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Is SEO ruining the written word?

I would like to preface this with saying that I love the Web, and I think it's an amazing and essential tool through which to find information, especially information that 10 years ago would have been impossible to find from the relative comfort of your home and/or office.

However, this MediaPost column, "If you want to show up for a keyword, use it," got me to thinking about the role of writer in the Web equation. This isn't the first time I've heard people tout the optimization of text. At a previous job, it was customary for a "Web" person to rewrite the headlines to stories posted on our magazine's Web site, to search engine optimize them, and it was a source of constant struggle. Why? To me this gets to a fundamental question of what is more important when it comes to writing for the Web--is it that the information is clearly written, as it is in print, in order present a full story to the reader or is it more important that the story is chock full of keyword phrases so that a reader might more easily find that story?

I realize that I seem like a dinosaur here, but I think search engines have forced us to dumb down our copy and fill it with jargon in order that it might neatly fit into the algorithms they've devised so that we can feel better about the amount of traffic coming to our sites. It would be interesting to know whether people found content on the Web to be more useful before the advent of SEO or whether they've noticed at all.

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Posted by Nikki Golden on Friday, December 7, 2007 @ 4:41 PM
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