The Broadcast Education Association (BEA) has been conducting faculty contests for better than a decade. The BEA Media Arts combines all former Division Competitions, organizing them under a single umbrella. The BEA Festival has quickly become one of the largest faculty and student competitions in the nation.

What's in this for me as a faculty member? The Festival is an activity of BEA conducted as a major showcase for the creative works of full-time faculty. It helps you build a stronger tenure and promotion portfolio, while offering recognition, accolades, feedback, networking, and an abundance of reward opportunities for your creative work products. The student awards provide accolades for your student's work, your program and your school

How do I enter? Watch the Festival Web and any advertising for the annual calls for creative works. They will explain the details of entering the different categories. You'll see these calls appearing in your BEA and your Division newsletters generally in the late summer or early fall. Check the BEA Festival Web pages. The Festival Committee has worked to streamline the entering process; the rules and the forms are here on the Web.

What are the award competitions? At present there are two general awards competitions: faculty and student awards. The faculty awards are limited to professors and professional academics. These are individuals working full-time within a teaching unit of a university or college. The student awards are limited to individuals who are full time students enrolled at a university or college at the time the entry was produced. The Committee has just approved a graduate student category, which we hope to launch within a few years.

What specific competitions exist? These specific competitions are traditionally defined along Interest Division lines, and the Festival Committee basically follows the patterns set in the past by the Division activities. The faculty competitions are: Audio, Documentary, Interactive Multimedia, Video, Scriptwriting, and News. Student Competitions are in: Audio, Documentary, Interactive Multimedia, Video, Script wring, and News, and 2-Year Small Colleges.

Can you give some examples of what's appropriate within these competitions? Yes, the entrance categories are defined by the individual competition. For example, the Faculty Audio competition has content categories in: station image promo, public service announcement, radio documentary, short-form production and long-form production. News has television hard news reporting, television feature reporting, radio hard news reporting and radio feature reporting. The specific categories, in which you would enter your creative works, are clearly defined in the "Rules and Regulations" on the Festival web site. There are also specific rules of eligibility and submission. Follow those entry R&Rs carefully; otherwise, your entry may be disqualified before it is even considered.

How is my faculty entry going to be judged? Faculty entries are evaluated in a blind review process, similar to published research articles. A festival Competition Chair, who coordinates each specific competition category, works with faculty and professionals across the nation to "jury" your work. The Festival Review Board has been organized and operates like an editorial board for a scholarly refereed journal. People making up the review board constitute a large group of nationally recognized professionals and professors, who may be organized into panels, for judging individual faculty entries. Individual entries are sent to the judges, by the co-chair, much like research articles are sent to the reviewers. The Best of the Festival award acceptance rate for 2005 was 3%. The Best of the Competition acceptance award rate averaged 8.4% for that same year.

What are the criteria for judging faculty work? The judging focuses on the following criteria: professionalism, the use of aesthetic and/or creative elements, sense of structure and timing, production values, technical merit and the overall contributions to the discipline in both form and substance.

What awards are presented? Isn't a juried publication acceptance a little different than a "first place award"? In the faculty competition, there are three award titles: BEA Award of Excellence, the BEA Best of Competition and the Best of the BEA Festival. The awards of excellence connote superior quality works, parallel in idea to the research acceptance for publication in a refereed journal. There are no first, second, third place awards in faculty competition. The "best of competition" awards are selected from within each competitive category by the judges. The "best of festival" awards are selected from among the "best of the competition."

What are my chances of winning? To quote the lottery campaign slogans, "You can't win, if you don't play." Seriously, the number of entries varies greatly from year to year and, thus, the competition itself. For people who've not entered before you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. If you want to learn more about BEA and the Festival competition attend the festival sessions at the BEA Convention and watch the work of you colleagues, measure your own against what you see. Then, try and enter each year. The more formal response to the question is that each competition chair targets an overall acceptance rate of approximately 20%. This is generally parallel with the better acceptance rate of our leading journals.

What about judging the student categories? The student competitions are significantly different from faculty. Peer review is not necessary to a student's career. However, student competition demands the same rigor as all other competitions. Panels for these competitions are organized by the Competition Chair who calls upon a panel of recognized professors and/or professionals to evaluate and provide feedback for each student entry. The rules of ethics, fairness and propriety rest upon the shoulders of the competition chair.

What awards do the students get? The student competition awards are titled by the specific competition. Traditionally, these have included first, second and third place awards, as well as awards of merit as determined by the judging panel. Students winning Best of the Festival often receive handsome prizes from sponsors. In 2005 the Charles and Lucille King Foundation awarded $1,000 in each Best of Festival category and Avid provided each with editing software packages as a part of the student award.

Who works with clearances and copyrights? In both faculty and student competition, copyright clearances are the responsibility of the individual who enters. The complexities of the law prohibit BEA from entering into any distribution of a creative work. The Festival focus resides on exhibition. Everyone who enters the competition in any category is required to complete and sign a Festival release form. You'll find a copy on the web. When you sign that release form, you are providing the legal clearance BEA needs. And, in so doing, you warrant that you have obtained legal clearance and/or relevant license to the materials within your work.

What about the Festival activities? The festival is conducted in conjunction with the annual BEA Convention in association with the NAB and sponsor exhibitions. The awards sessions are the capstones of the festival. You'll see them within the Convention program. Each competition conducts award sessions for its student and faculty awards. The Best of the Festival is the general award session where Best of the Festival Awards are given. In 2005 this session was sponsored by the Charles and Lucille King Foundation and Avid and hosted by Price Hicks. Hicks is the Director of Educational Programs and Services for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundations.

Can you simplify the Festival's organization structure? There are three primary units within the Festival structure: the festival committee, Competition Chairs, and the Review Board. (1) The Festival Committee is organized under the direction of the Board of Directors. The Festival Committee functions with a chair, who is appointed by the Board of Directors. It acts on behalf of the board, establishing direction and guidelines for the overall activities (2) Festival Competition Chairs are organized within the general committee and these conduct specific competitions. The names of Competition Chairs normally come from the recommendation of the Division Chairs and they serve for two years. Under general festival guidelines they plan and execute the Festival. (3) The Review Board constitutes a group of scholars and professionals who are a resource pool for the Co-chairs once the judging of entries begins. Assuming that the Competition Chairs are the equivalent of a "journal editor" in the faculty review process, then the review board is the editorial board.

BEA statement on the creative work. The Board approved the statement April 2002. Basically, the statement affirms the value of a faculty member's creative work in relation to promotion and tenure deliberations. It declares that such work should be "recognized as equal to scholarly publication." The statement was published in Feedback and you'll find a copy of it on the Festival web site. Faculty who are preparing portfolios for creative works will find this document especially valuable.