SARATOGA -- With nine first-place awards, Oswego-based NPR affiliate WRVO was the big winner among radio stations -- both locally and statewide -- at the New York State Associated Press Broadcast Association Awards over the weekend. On the other hand, all but two of the nominations for local TV stations did not materialize into first-place awards.
For winning more first place awards than any other radio station, WRVO took home the NYSAPBA's Steve Flanders Award, which, the Associated Press says, is "given to the radio station with the most top finishes in the competition for news stories aired during the previous calendar year."
Back in April, we reported the list of local nominations here, so here are the results from the NYSAPBA annual awards banquet in Saratoga Springs on Saturday night. (Awards and categories that don't involve any stations within the CNYRadio.com coverage area are omitted.) Radio tops the list, television's further down this page.
WRVO was the only station in the CNYRadio.com coverage area to receive any nominations.
Category 2: Best News Special/Documentary
Category 9: Best Sports Coverage
Category 11: General excellence in use of medium
For television stations within the CNYTVNews.com coverage area, here are the results:
Category 1: Best Regularly Scheduled Local News Program
For this category, stations are only allowed to submit newscasts which aired during one of two randomly-selected AP "Contest Days" during 2010. The dates are not announced to stations until the morning-of; the idea is to evaluate stations on an "average" day where they have little opportunity to plan anything extraordinary for the contest. For 2010, the contest days were October 20 and November 18.
The keynote speech at the dinner was given by Jeff Glor, news anchor for The Early Show on CBS. Glor is a Syracuse University graduate who started his career at Syracuse's WSTM.
Reporter Andrew Siff won first place for "Best Feature" in the Class 1 (New York City) television awards, for a piece called "The Gift of Healing" he and photographer Michael DelGiudice produced for WNBC-TV. The pair also won first place in the "Best Sports Coverage" category for a story called "Absolutely No Prayer." An observant CNYRadio.com / CNYTVNews.com reader reminds us Siff worked for Syracuse's WTVH in the early 1990s.
And the Bill Leaf Memorial Award for Best Regularly Scheduled Local [College Radio] News Program went to WRHU at Hofstra University -- two newscasts submitted by the same team of students were the only nominees in the category. In the end, their March 25th newscast took first place over the March 16th newscast. The award is named after Bill Leaf, a graduate of Henniger High School and Syracuse University, who was killed in a head-on crash with a wrong-way drunk driver in 2006. Leaf had been working as a reporter for WSYR radio and a backup sports anchor for WTVH. An annual kickball tournament raises money for a college scholarship in Bill's memory.
Our thanks to a CNYRadio.com / CNYTVNews.com reader for passing along the complete list of award winners.