Championship Season

It's that time of the year again. Awards and championships are on everyone's mind. As of this writing, we're counting down to the Super Bowl. The cover story of this month's Control features four more people elected to the Process Automation Hall of Fame. The Academy Awards are also in the offing, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of other smaller contests and award ceremonies going on all over the country.

The date circled in red on my calendar was January 28. That's the deadline for submitting items for the Azbees—the journalism awards offered by the American Society of Business Press Editors. It's not a big deal to anyone who doesn't work in the trade press, but to us insiders, it's important. Magazines as well-known as Computerworld and as little-known as Scrap submit items to be judged by a jury of our peers.

Control has won its share of Azbees for editorial and design work. You can sample some of our award-winning entries at ControlGlobal.com.

Jim Montague won a 2010 regional gold award for his feature article, "Simulation Breaks Out". That was a good year for Control. Two "Other Voices" columns by John Cusimano and Eric Byres (June, "Could Cyber Terrorists Attack Our Company?", and October, "The Can of Worms Is Open. Now What?"), won the regional gold award for Best Contributed Column. The digital publishing team won a national bronze award for best e-newsletter. The two issues cited were April 5 and Sept. 27.

In addition, 2010 was the year Control was named one of the 10 Best Magazines of the year.

Our senior technical editor, Dan Hebert, won the national bronze award in 2009 for his Technically Speaking columns in March and May ("Systems Integrators Strike Back," and "Surviving the Slowdown.")

Are we proud of the work we've done in the past? You betcha. It keeps us motivated to keep up the good work, and more important, to continue to provide information that is useful to you.