An Exciting Night at the JAG Awards

By George Fairfield, JAG Awards Committee, Chair

The curtain has come down on another JAG Awards season.  On behalf of JAG and the Awards Committee, I congratulate everyone; not only all the Award of Excellence, Distinction, & Recognition winners, but also ALL those who entered even just one program into the JAG Awards.  These days it is not easy for a PEG station, a Non-profit, or an Independent Producer to create a program.  We all have budgets to navigate through; we all have to maneuver through the different agendas along our paths; and let us not forget how we all must constantly pilot through the obstacles the pandemic keeps throwing into our way.  Nevertheless, with all this and more swirling around, our PEG community produced and entered into the JAG Awards Competition some of the most diverse programs ever.  AND we had some of the most diversity among the winners than I can recall.

Asbury Park

We had small PEG stations with volunteer crews winning Award of Excellence!  We had Non-profit organizations winning Award of Excellence!  And we had Independent Producers winning Award of Excellence!  There were twelve different JAG members who won an Award of Excellence award.  That is 12 different members of JAG winning at least one of the possible 16 Award of Excellence awards which were presented during the awards ceremony.  Also during the awards ceremony, there were eight different JAG members winning an Award of Distinction certificate and seven different members winning an Award of Recognition certificate.     

NJ Advocates for Aging Well

On top of all these winners, the JAG Awards Committee handed out 29 gold certificates and 24 silver certificates.  Literally, every entry was awarded an adjudicated certificate.  This is more individual members receiving more recognition for their hard work than have ever been awarded before. 

Here is a link https://jagonline.org/jag-award-winners/ to the complete list of winners for each category.

Piscataway

Along with all of these new adjudicated certificates and awards, a whole new method of tracking each entry as it moved through the competition needed to be developed and implemented.  Thank goodness for TelVue & Google because everything was now to be handled online.  The committee’s greatest worry was to accidentally award an entry the wrong award or completely lose an entry, but thankfully, the hard work and dedication of the JAG Awards Committee paid off.  There were no wrong awards handed out; no entry left out during its journey to the TelVue Connect then out to the judges; no score sheet lost during its journey from Google forms to the judges and back; and finally no foul ups at the awards ceremony.  I would like to take this moment and thank the committee members; Dave Garb, Valerie Stevens, and Ronni Garrett.  Without you I would have completely lost my mind and something somewhere certainly would have been missed or forgotten.  I also want to give an extra thank you to Ronni Garrett for running master control during the awards ceremony at the banquet, you kept us on track and on time; and to Samantha Urash, you are always a pleasure and a professional to work with on stage; and I cannot forget to thank J Robertson for flying all the way from Hawaii to MC the Jag Awards.  Ok, he didn’t come just to MC the JAG Awards, but my gratitude is no less.  Thanks to all of you for making this year’s JAG Awards Ceremony a wonderful event.

J Robertson

The JAG Awards Committee would also like to thank Planet Networks for your sponsorship of the JAG Awards.  We could not have given out so many awards in person if it was not for your support. 

We all know the first rule to having a successful production is to feed your crew (or guest) well and adding happy hour with spirits is a great bonus.  In recognition of this, the awards committee thanks Municipal Captioning for your sponsorship of the cocktail hour and Varto Technologies for your sponsorship of the banquet.  Without these sponsors, setting the tone for the evening, the awards ceremony would not have been as much of a success as it was.  But the greatest thanks goes to all the JAG Awards participants.  Without you, for starters, all of our stations would have far less programming to air and let’s face it, the judges would just be looking at static on a monitor. On behalf of the awards committee, we look forward to seeing what you produce this year and enter into next year’s JAG Awards.