The International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) and Alltech have opened nominations for the 2023 IFAJ/Alltech Young Leaders program. The application deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.

This is a great opportunity for our ACN members -- the prestigious program recognizes young agricultural journalists (age 35 or younger as of Dec. 31, 2023) who demonstrate excellence in their profession as well as outstanding leadership potential. Winners of the award are invited to participate in the upcoming IFAJ Congress and a special Boot Camp, a program that combines leadership training, network development, and story-gathering in the field in the days prior to Congress.

Applicants selected for the Young Leaders program will be registered free of charge (registration, hotel, and meals) to attend the Young Leaders program in Calgary, Alberta in Canada which will be held from June 24-26, 2023, as well as the IFAJ Congress in Olds, Alberta, that follows from June 27 to July 3, 2023. Participants are responsible for their own travel costs.

Once you apply, our guild (ACN) goes through applications from ACN members and selects one person to nominate as our official candidate for consideration for the award/program. Then, an international panel of judges evaluates all the candidates and selects the 2023 Young Leaders. Judges look for evidence of professional skill, achievements, leadership potential, guild involvement, and interest in the program's goals.

For more information on the IFAJ/Alltech Young Leaders program, visit ifaj.org or contact [email protected]. Application forms can be found here.

STAR PRIZE DEADLINE, CHANGES IN RULES

The IFAJ Star Prize contest is now open for entries until Feb. 28; there are some differences this year for people to note.

New this year, individual members of IFAJ member guilds can nominate themselves and enter their work directly into the online form. So, if you're an ACN member, you can go ahead and do your own entry. Entries must have been published in 2022 or awarded a prize in a 2022 guild contest. (So, in ACN's 2022 awards, this includes content that may have run in 2021-22).

At the end of the entry period, IFAJ will collect all entries from each guild and ask the guild -- in our case, ACN -- to select one official entry for each category. Guilds may also nominate the work of one of its members in any category through online forms. (For example, in the past we entered the award winners from our prior year's ACN awards competition and entered them into the relevant categories.)

The categories include print, broadcast audio, broadcast video, and digital media. In the latter, this includes at least two forms of storytelling, including text, images, audio, video, etc. (This is a change from prior years of the contest when three storytelling forms were required.)

For writing entries, you're judged on style, credibility, creativity, clarity, use of detail, objectivity, and relevance to the audience -- not on layout or design.

As an ACN member, you can enter the IFAJ Star Prize for Photography yourself; there is no limit to a number of entries per guild in the photo contest, although each participant can only enter one photo per category (people, production, nature/landscape). The photos must portray some aspect of agriculture or rural life.

There are no entry fees for the writing and photography contests.

To see the complete list of categories and rules, go to: https://www.ifaj.org/contests-and-awards/

If you have more questions about the categories, contact IFAJ Secretary General Addy Rossi at [email protected].