Do you produce a community or village magazine? Are you and your readers proud of it? If so, it could be a winner in this year’s Cambridge Building Society Community Magazine Awards.

The annual awards have been revamped this year to give more magazines more chances to compete, but the overall idea behind the scheme – to recognise the commitment of the mainly volunteers involved in running these publications -  remains the same.

Lesley Hollamby from the Cambridge Building Society said, “This is the twelfth year we’ve run these awards and we’re delighted to have some new categories this year.

“We’ve split the best magazine award into high frequency (10-12 issues per year) and low frequency (4-9 issues) categories. We’ve also come up with two new categories; ‘Best Specialist Magazine’, for those publications which cover a specific area of our community such as the Scouts and the Church, etc; and ‘Best Commercial Magazine’.”

Old favourites such as ‘Most Improved Magazine’ and ‘Best Newcomer’ are still very much in evidence and there’ll be special prizes for the ‘Best Photo’, which will be judged by the Society’s customers, and the ‘Best Article’, which will be judged by the Society’s staff.

“We hope the new and changed categories, as well as the silverware and cash prizes, will open up the competition to more magazines”, adds Lesley. “The eagle eyed judges, however, will still be looking out for features such as the editorial quality, community content and presentation. Plus, of course, their usefulness to the community.”

Entry packs can be downloaded below:

Entry Form

Judging Criteria

Categories

The closing date for entries is Friday 19th March, 2010.

Completed entry forms should be sent to Cambridge Building Society’s Head Office Administration Centre, 51 Newmarket Road, Cambridge, CB5 8FF or any of its branches in and around the Cambridge area.  The awards evening will take place on Wednesday 14th April 2010.