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by Douglas Dow
Each year in the STC newsletter competition, three judges assess three issues of Technically Write. With two competitions now under my belt, I must suspect that each year it is our fate to encounter one "Soviet judge." (During the cold war, Olympic skating competitions, in particular, were notorious for at least one judge from the Eastern Block to score US figure skaters extremely low. It came to be that the credibility of Soviet judges was somewhat near that of Saddam's Minister of Information this past Spring.)
Judges either love Technically Write's delivery format, or they hate it. Judge # 3 this year really groks the medium (Grok: it's in the American Heritage Fourth Edition. Look it up.):
The newsletter takes full advantage of Web delivery. The Table of Contents and the set of hyperlinks at the bottom of each page are great navigability aids that prevent readers from getting lost.
Judge # 1 had a different outlook:
The navigation scheme is confusing because of expanding and collapsing of entries. Items that appear under category link and indented from it are actually separate from it. Items within each category are hidden unless the category is expanded. Display of navigational hierarchy needs improvement.... The one aspect of this otherwise excellent newsletter that clearly needs improvement is the navigation.
Judge # 1 also felt that the design of the newsletter should match the "impressive" design of the chapter home page. Some chapters use a uniform design if they produce an HTML newsletter. (PDF-based newsletters seldom match the chapter's Web site design.) I have on occasion had trouble differentiating between a chapter's Web site and it's newsletter when the design is too similar. To avoid that problem, Technically Write is entirely different in design.
Judge # 1 had a problem with one of Technically Write's features. The cover page displays only when you first open the e-zine. After that, it's gone. It gets out of the way. At that point you should know what you're reading. Judge # 1 found this "very weird." Perhaps that's why the judge docked us for not finding the society's mission statement, which was displayed there.
Note: With the arrival of the Society's new mission statement, we have caved in and created a page for it that judges in the future may find. We will not, however, align our Table of Contents to match, item by item, the required elements as outlined in the Newsletter Competition Rules, as some newsletters have begun to do. We do not feel that any rules should govern the structure of our content.
Judges will always find something that displeases. That's the nature of competition. As more chapter newsletters go online, each chapter finding an online format convenient for it, the newsletter competition finds it more difficult to apply uniform rules to myriad implementations.
The factor for us at Technically Write is convenience. With deadlines and publication dates ever closer together, we don't have the time to craft individual pages, complete with links and graphics. Our object-oriented tool allows us to automatically produce the pages you see, links and graphics included, while allowing for last-minute flexibility.
If the newsletter competition took into account timeliness and ease of production, Technically Write would be a perennial winner.