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As anyone who reads IBJ knows, we love to recognize people who are doing great things for the community. At IBJ Media—which encompasses IBJ, Indiana Lawyer and Inside INdiana Business—we have about a dozen awards programs, including Indiana 250, which recognizes the most influential business and community leaders in the state.
At IBJ, we honor up-and-coming leaders through Forty Under 40 and 20 in their Twenties, female leaders through Women of Influence and business executives through programs like Tech Exec of the Year.
We have three more awards programs yet this year: Women of Influence, scheduled for Oct. 31; CFO of the Year, which will take place Dec. 5; and the Michael A. Carroll Award, which will be presented at an Engage Indiana event on Dec. 12.
But already, we’re gearing up to begin accepting nominations for two of our 2025 events—Forty Under 40 and Health Care Heroes.
Most of these programs are based on nominations. In fact, for programs like Forty Under 40, nearly every honoree comes from a nomination. Occasionally, IBJ editors or outside judges will suggest names of people who haven’t been nominated, and we’ll do a little investigating and sometimes add them to the list. But nominations are the backbone.
That’s why it has been a little disconcerting this year that our nominations numbers have been down a bit. Some programs have still been flush with nominations. We receive so many suggestions for deserving people that we have a difficult time choosing.
But in other programs, we can end up with fewer nominations than we’d like—a few dozen or so for a program in which we’ll honor 18 people, for example.
So far, we’ve been lucky. The people who have been nominated for our programs have been great, and we truly believe we are recognizing people who are important leaders in our community and in key industries, not-for-profits and government.
But we do worry a bit that the quantity of nominations has been dropping.
So we’d like to hear from you about how we can make the nominations process better. What would encourage you to nominate an executive in your organization for an award? How can we better tell you about the opportunities that already exist?
If you have previously submitted a nomination, tell us how you think the process worked. What would make a nomination easier to submit? Where did we make it harder than it needs to be?
And for all readers, we’d like to hear about what you think of our awards programs overall. Are there industries or areas you think we’re missing? Do you like the way we present our honorees in print and online? Do you think we’re transparent enough about how our honorees are chosen?
Anytime you’re intimately involved in an operation, you lose perspective on what’s working and what’s not. And so we want you to help us by giving us that perspective.
I’ll be working the rest of this year with Samm Quinn, who has been IBJ’s special publications editor for three years and was just promoted to managing editor, and others at IBJ Media to rethink some of our awards programs and events, keeping in mind the newsroom’s primary goal is to find and recognize people doing great work.
If you have ideas for how we do that, please send your thoughts to ibjedit@ibj.com with AWARDS in the subject line, and we’ll give them serious consideration. Thanks for reading IBJ.•
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Weidenbener is editor of IBJ and assistant publisher of IBJ and Indiana Lawyer. Reach her at lweidenbener@ibj.com.
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