Judges Comments

First Place – While the imagery is wonderful, pulling from an entire year's work is a daunting task. Choosing the best of the best is hard enough but this package goes much further. They did not attempt to address all of the news items of the year but instead to carefully curate topic areas they deemed most important. The strong aesthetic of the imagery used helps for us to not only be reminded of the information but to linger in what it felt like. Each section uses a fresh perspective for the composition of the page while still holding up as an entire set without falling into redundancy. Second Place – This package did a nice job of presenting strong imagery that both included the main subjects of the story while providing a broader sense of the people and places affected by the storm. It would have been easy to show image after image of volunteers, this is a nice balance. We especially liked the lede image to open the story as well as the clothesline image on the final page. Breaking the flow of the essay in a way that seemed unnecessary was the portrait on the final page and it may have been better if excluded. Third Place – Nice to see access to a sensitive story in a classic approach. While it was great to see so much space dedicated to photography, this package may have risen higher by a tighter edit. Particularly on the double-truck it seemed that there were redundancies visually and pictures present that did not advance significantly the information of the story or an emotional impact.