J-Day contests open today, which means it’s time to start gathering your best work from the past year. For most categories (newspapers, online media, broadcast, photo), it means submitting work from the 2016-17 academic year. For yearbooks, it’s anything from the 2016 book.

If you still have questions, here is the lowdown on BSU J-Day Contests:

THE BASICS
Contests are open from today until March 10.
Entries are $6 each.
Entries can be submitted here: https://bsujournalismworkshops.submittable.com/submit
Each school needs to fill out an entry form and send with a P.O., check or indicate that it was paid online: http://bsujournalismworkshops.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2017ENTRYFORM.pdf

ANYONE CAN ENTER
You don’t have to be from Indiana to enter the BSU J-Day Contests. Sure, Ball State is located in Muncie, but we accept entries from around the country. We love to see entries from schools in other states, and we would love to have even more schools participate!

THERE ARE SEEMINGLY ENDLESS CATEGORIES TO CHOOSE FROM
Having a hard time with the categories? They are labeled first by the publication they fall under (newspaper, yearbook, broadcast or photo) and then labeled with the specific type of story/video/photo/design. There are plenty of categories to choose from (18 for news, nine for yearbook, five for photography and four for broadcast).

Is there a category you think should be included? Send your suggestion to bsuworkshops@bsu.edu and we will take it into consideration for next year.

SOME CATEGORIES GET MORE LOVE THAN OTHERS
So use this to your advantage! We often have fewer entries in our broadcast news and sports play-by-play categories, our yearbook senior ads category and quite a few of our news design categories (both print and online).

THERE IS NO LIMIT TO AWARDS
We give out a number of awards generally pretty reflective of how many entries we receive in that category. So, if we receive 10 entries, usually one or two will get Superior, one or two will get Excellent and one or two will get Honorable Mention. That means, the more people who enter, the more awards we are able to give out. So get to submitting!