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Journalists tend to be deadline-driven. I don’t know whether that’s because the job demands it or because journalism’s many deadlines attract people who thrive on them. For me, it’s both.
And so you can imagine the irony when I’m pestering IBJ reporters about meeting their deadlines even as I’m finishing my column at the last minute. (I can hear them groaning as they read this, though I don’t think they’ll be surprised.)
But I’m writing about deadlines this week for another reason. IBJ is accepting nominations for our 2023 Women of Influence program. As of this writing, the deadline is Friday—meaning the day this column publishes.
We have had several requests to extend the deadline. And it’s likely—though the decision was not finalized at the time of my deadline—that we’ll give readers another few days to submit nominations.
But I wanted to offer a little insight into why we often do not extend deadlines—and when we do, not by weeks at a time, as is often requested.
Our nomination deadlines for these programs are not arbitrary. They are based on when the event celebrating the honorees and the publication profiling them are scheduled, which is usually on or about the same day.
Those dates are typically set a year or more advance. Then we count back for all other deadlines related to the project.
This year’s Women of Influence program is scheduled for Oct. 19, with the publication set to be released the next day. That might make a July deadline for nominations seem incredibly early. But there’s a lot to be done between the nomination deadline and the publication.
Once the nominations are in, the judges—in this case, IBJ editors, IBJ Media execs and former Women of Influence honorees—take at least a week to review them individually. That time is especially important for the Women of Influence program because we typically receive close to 200 nominations for roughly 20 spots.
Then the judges get together to compare notes and choose the honorees. This is a fairly time-consuming affair as well. As I’ve mentioned here before, we typically agree on the first few picks and then spend quite a bit of time debating about the rest. We all leave the room having successfully advocated for some of the folks we wanted and with some of them left off the list.
Once the list is settled, I or Special Publications Editor Samm Quinn notifies the honorees, a process that includes asking them for more details and scheduling them for photos and videos. We also choose honorees for the cover and schedule a special shoot for that.
In the meantime, Samm or another writer is putting together the profiles, which receive two edits before they go to our designers, who lay out the entire publication. That needs to be done well before the event, so those layouts can be turned into plaques for the honorees.
My goal in giving you all that detail is to explain why we have limited ability to extend deadlines. When we can, we sometimes do. But every day that we add to the nomination period is one fewer day we have to do the best job we can putting the event and publication together.
That’s why we urge you not to count on an extended deadline. Yes, we provide a few extra days occasionally, but more often than not, the schedule just doesn’t allow us to do so.
To learn more about our awards programs and to submit nominations, go to www.ibj.com/nominations.•
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Weidenbener is editor of IBJ. Email her at lweidenbener@ibj.com.
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