And the winner is...

Nobody.

Everyone likes a pat on the back, but no one loves it more than newspaper managers who have helped create a system of contests that rewards imitation and ignores innovation or humor.

Aside from the Pulitzer Prize, most of the annual journalism contests end with predictable winners and prize winning stories that most readers never fully digested.

"Contest packages" as they are sometimes called in the business often consume excessive inches of newsprint on stories, graphics and pictures that are aimed not at interesting readers, but dazzling contest judges.

This will sound crass, and I don't mean it to, but one of the surest ways to win a press association or associated press annual award is to find a burn victim with shockingly serious wounds and follow them through rehabilitation.

Substitute any gross disfigurement and the result is the same.

Contest editors routinely reward news reporters and photographers who follow that rehab or "shock-the-reader" template. To me, it is exploitive and frankly, an easy way to an award.

Understand that newspaper contests are generally judged by other newspaper editors.

This is how it works, a state press association finds a group of editors in another state, sends contest entries from their state. At some point the editors, who suppposedly have read all the entries and sidebars, sit around a big table and wax brightly about which are the best.

They settle on the top three stories, rank them first, second, third and then fire off a notification and some brass plaques and the paper then features the contest winners in the next Sunday paper. Of course the awards are given in a variety of categories based on circulation numbers and just about everyone is going to have a plaque or two to brag about.

In Michigan, annually a "Newspaper of the Year" is named. In their honest moments, editors will admit that the title gets passed around on a more or less regular basis so every newspaper in every category gets a turn as "Newspaper of the Year."

Again it's a big "whoopee!" for the paper, but I'm not sure that it really impresses readers.

During my 30-year career I wrote a light, sometimes humorous column - "Off Beat" - on the antics of dumb criminals and some of the funny things that would come up on the police beat. It was well read and people seemed to like it.

But that column would never win an award. Even though it was popular with readers it would never get a moment's notice from a contest committee.

Columns that are rewarded by contest committees are the dark, emotional personal recollections of death and tragedy. Contest editors salivate over those.

The Pulitzer Prize - and I'm hoping the Detroit Free Press gets a shot with its Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick coverage - is really the only journalism award that means something. And even that has an element of fate involved.

Winners of the Pulitzer Prize have usually been newspapers who have covered an extreme events - 9/11 - the Oklahoma City bombing - Columbine shootings - Hurricane Katrina, etc. But at least the Pulitzer honors real news reporting on a real news event and not some feature or investigative piece borrowed from last year's contest winners.

It's not that I haven't won a few awards myself, I've got several brass plaques stored away in boxes in the attic. It's just that the stories attached to them were not my favorite assignments.

The truth is my best reporting and writing was done on the day-to-day breaking news coverage that rarely wins awards.