Welcome to the news and update page for the NPPA clips contest.
January 2025 contest update.
Effective for the 2025 competition please note the following changes.
Regional Consolidation
The first, and likely most significant, will be the consolidation of two of our regions into one for the purposes of the competition. The New York/International and Mid-Atlantic regions have been laboring under very low participation for several years now, despite all efforts to boost the number of entrants. Beginning with the January clips (those entered starting February 1st, 2025) members in those two regions will enter a singular clips region designated as East on the entry submission form and in the results. This will both create a deeper pool of entries and create greater competition for points, giving the judges a wider variety of images to consider each month. The combining of the pool of judges will also be a net benefit. We are also closely monitoring participation in other regions, and there may be future merges for the clips in the future. For the purposes of NPPA Governance, the two regions remain separate and independent.
Unpublished images eligibility change
Secondly, in response to the tectonic shift in the industry that has taken place over the last couple decades, the clips, which was created as and has remained, a competition exclusively for published photojournalism, will open on a limited and carefully proscribed basis, to work that was not published as part of a published series of images. Starting with the January clips, entrants may include, in a multi-photo entry, a limited number of images captured as part of a set of images from one story/series. The number of unpublished images in the entry must be the minority of images, and the entrant must have permission from the copyright holder/licensee/assigning editor/employer for the release of the unpublished works (depending upon the terms under which the images were captured/licensed/published). For example, a Photo Story/Essay entry, which may have from 5-20 images, could have from two of five, or nine of 20, unpublished images from the unpublished collection. For any other category, where the range is from three to 15 images in a multi-photo entry (such as General News), the same sort of limits apply, a three image entry could only have one unpublished image, a 15-image entry could have seven unpublished images. This change is an attempt to recognize that many photojournalists who might enter The Clips no longer work as staffers, or perhaps work as staffers in situations where there is no longer a dedicated visuals manager at the publication making decisions about photo selection. This change only applies to those multi-image entries in order to maintain the competition’s historic nod to the published images. Single image entries must still be published per the competition standards.
2024 rules changes enforcement
As the changes instituted for 2024 and previously, the PORT category, the Title Slide requirement, and multi-image category numbers, have now been in place for a year or more, and the Clips Contest chairs will be more strict in enforcing those rules. Entries not meeting those standards will be disqualified at the entry stage and will not be submitted to judges.