Word: prized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the San Francisco-based entrepreneurs Will Petty and Skye Thompson posted a notice on Craig's List last May announcing their website FieldReport.com, which offers pots of prize money for the best nonfiction stories submitted, they were met with incredulity and even foul language by skeptics who thought they smelled a rat. "They were downright rude to us," Thompson recalled. "We were really shocked." (A typical post: "Yeah right...
...checks went out to the authors of the winning stories in each of FieldReport's contest categories (there are 21, from "Animal Beings" to "Life + Me" to "Love + Hate" to "Style+Beauty+Body"). The most highly ranked story on the site for the month won an extra $4,000 prize. In July, $40,000 had gone out to the victors of a trial-run "beta" contest, including a grand prize of $20,000 to the author of the most popular story overall...
...send a story in now, you have a fair shot at winning one of the $1,000 prizes to awarded next on Nov. 1, and at the end of the year competing for the $250,000 grand prize for best story of 2008. That's less than the Nobel Prize winner for Literature - for which this year's laureate, French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, will pick up a little under $1,500,000 - but considerably more than the Pulitzer purse of $10,000. Says Thompson, "We are confident the FieldReport prize for experiential writing...
...story (1500 stories have been submitted so far), but in return each entrant must review at least five other stories to have his or her own considered. "We're getting between 15 and 20 reviews on our site per story, from users who love to review," Petty said. The prize-winning stories receive far more reviews than that, and the number of positive reviews decides each story's ranking. In January, the best-reviewed story of 2008 will claim the $250,000 jackpot...
...Petty said. "Unlike The New Yorker, where you have a certain style and standard, here the judging process is much more emotional. In some cases, the judges respond to the reality of the story; in other cases, they respond to really great writing." The winner of the July grand prize, as well as of category prizes in both July and October, was a letter carrier from Portland, Ore., named Murr Brewster, whose folksy commentary on low-rise jeans and other fashion trends won in "Style+Beauty+Body." (An excerpt: "rolling cumulonimbus mounds of flesh were thundering out of pants...