Award Story Jurisdiction

To: All WSU College of Education faculty and staff
From: C. Brandon Chapman – WSU College of Education Marketing and Communications Director
Date: January 18, 2018

A few things about our award stories and who is in charge.

You ever watch crime dramas and see two different agencies fighting over whose case it is, based on jurisdiction?

This isn’t a whole lot different than the considerations we have to make with on-campus news and stepping on each other’s feet.

A few examples:

• Great (hypothetical) news: The Office of the Provost gives its annual distinguished faculty award to Yong Chae Rhee (congrats)! We get excited and want to put out a release.
• Jurisdiction: It may be great news. But, as this is the provost’s award to give out, it’s also the provost’s office who has the right to put out a release announcing its winner.
• Great news: Four faculty members from three different colleges win a prestigious research award. They win in different categories, but they all win. One of the winners is our faculty member.
• Jurisdiction: If we send something in to WSU News, they will tell us that they don’t want to do separate stories for the different colleges. So they pick either an entity on campus that deals with all of them, or they have someone from WSU News itself do the article. Here’s a real-life example from 2016 that I just pulled up: https://news.wsu.edu/2016/05/26/three-wsu-advisors-receive-international-awards/. Notice how the Office of Undergraduate Education ended up doing the story about three advisors winning awards? Yes, Veronica won the award (as she so richly deserved!), but so did two other college’s folks. So, WSU News requested that a specific writer do a wrap-up.