Accepting awards crowns conference junket
Editor abandons desk for ten days in Toronto
DOUG
KOOP
CW Editor
I will begin at the end, where I represented Christianweek at the Canadian Church Press association’s annual awards ceremony. For the second year in a row Debra Fieguth’s reporting earned CW first place in the “Treatment of a News Event” category. The judges commended “Sudanese oil flows through Canadian connection” as “almost flawless,” declaring that “this piece is the clear winner.”
CW also received honourable mention certificates for Kevin Heinrichs’s provocative feature package on “Moderation and its discontents,” another for Debra’s hilarious piece about corresponding with a televangelist (“Peter Popoff was my pen pal”), and a third for my editorial, “These are days of miracles and wonders.”
The CCP’s atmosphere of friendly competition also provided an occasion to celebrate our counterparts at other publications. The General Excellence award in the newspaper category went this year to The Anglican Journal. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s Faith Today magazine earned the corresponding honour among magazines.
Less formally, convention participants selected CW for the “Peoples Choice” as best newspaper.
On the road again
Fraternizing with journalistic peers and accepting awards was the final event in the time I spent in southern Ontario in early May, an agreeable way to end a long week crammed with conferences and other splendid opportunities to meet more of the individuals and ministries who connect with CW.
The fact is, editors can all too easily get tied to their desks. Faxes, email, web pages and telephones can communicate a lot of information, but there’s still no real substitute for face-to-face meetings and on-the-spot reporting.
You can read about some of these events in the news pages of this issue–Equip 2000 in Burlington, Christian Expo at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, and the EFC’s mission-focused churches conference, also in Toronto. The information received, interviews conducted and contacts made are certain to percolate into CW in the weeks ahead.
There are costs to being on the road for that long. In the office, Debra and Kevin had to pick up some of the things I normally look after. But from the look of the issue that went to press while I was away (May 16), I should head out of the office more often. I also missed some important things on the home front–a 6-0 soccer loss, a broken badminton racket, and (cringe) a birthday. Fortunately, I did make it back just in time for Mother’s Day.
Gracious hospitality
One of the best things about being on the road is the opportunity to receive hospitality, which was generously extended wherever I went. I enjoyed first class treatment meeting the families and staying in the homes of two of CW’s most frequent contributors–Sue Careless and Joe Couto.
There were perks along the way. Sue and I attended graduation ceremonies at Wycliffe College and watched CW senior editorial advisor Maxwell Ryan receive his Masters of Theological Studies degree. And Joe managed to pick up corporate tickets to a Blue Jays game in Skydome–front row seats behind home plate. All in day’s work, eh?
Time on the road has a way of rejuvenating the content of our newspaper, but after just one week back my desk once again looks like a rest stop on the paper trail.