Not Winning Isn’t Losing : Journalism: Though criticized for unfairness or irrelevance, awards do define standards of excellence and stimulate quality.

Prizes symbolize excellence. Excellence celebrated can become a model and an inspiration for others. We think.

The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism administers many of the most prestigious and important awards in journalism.

Last month 64 leading newspaper editors were at the school to screen for the Pulitzer Prizes. Also last month, 44 leading magazine editors spent most of three days choosing the winners of the National Magazine Awards. Next week the Pulitzer Prize Board will meet for two days to pick this year’s winners.

The school’s awards activities begin every fall with the Maria Moors Cabot Awards for the best in Latin American reporting, continue in January with the Alfred I. du Pont Awards for excellence in broadcasting journalism, and end in May with graduating student awards, alumni awards, and the Journalism Day award for outstanding student journalist.

Journalism, as we know, is a very self-congratulatory business. But we’re not the only one. So is business. Government. Law and Medicine. Sports. Education. Music. Art.

The directory of all awards, honors and prizes published by Gale Research lists 271 awards in the journalism category, 61 more in broadcast journalism. It lists 12,500 entries in its eighth edition of “Awards, Honors, and Prizes,” published in 1989, up 2,500 from the 1988 edition.

If today everyone enjoys 15 minutes of fame, probably no one, or at least no journalist, will die prizeless.

Prize-giving has become an industry, and the competition for prestige and the use of awards as a public-relations tool are increasing, even as controversy about them abounds.

Here are some of the standard criticisms:

--The apparent value is largely ego-related--immortality for the grantor, or at least good public relations; clout for the administrator, and money and market value for the recipient.

--Some awards recognize and encourage convention and mediocrity rather than excellence and innovation.

--The selection processes can be subjective and political; judges are human, with biases, obligations and special interests that can affect their decisions.

--And look at the roster of accomplished writers and artists and brilliant works that have been ignored.

It is easier to question than it is to congratulate. I can add a few more questions.

Do editors, in pursuit of prizes, play to noticeable trends instead of unspectacular but important topics?

Do winners really have control over elements that sway judges one way or the other? Isn’t it the luck of the draw to get an assignment of topical value with visibility in the marketplace? And what is the relative value of award-winning coverage of the disaster-of-the-year or the problem-of-the-year that has no lasting meaning or consequence?

Let’s not make the mistake of assuming that competition in works of the mind started in the modern world, or in the United States, as a product of a materialistic, competitive culture that knows only the language of money, market value and fame as measures of accomplishment. History reports that in ancient Greece there were annual dramatic competitions. Judges decided whether Aeschylus or Sophocles was in better form that year, a kind of Acropolis Awards for artists and writers, who are no different from athletes in expressing a competitive human psyche in Olympic games of the intellect and spirit.

Today, the school is involved with these awards because we believe that they are an important part of our mission--to help define standards of excellence for the profession.

Do the awards provide incentives for excellent work? We think they do.

Do they stimulate quality, win public attention, possibly give a healthy boost to readership for worthy work? We think they do.

What I see in my close-up view of the process is the sincere and generous participation of a community of journalists in a ritual of recognition of their competitors and peers.

I see a search for a moral compass to help guide journalists in fulfilling their responsibility to inform the public in a free and democratic society.

I see a process of continual questioning of the procedures to make prizes and honors more fair, more just, more perfect, if you will.

But perfection is impossible, and what I see is an imperfect process in pursuit of a worthy ideal, a reflection of the best of intentions, urging us closer to the ideal.

It would help if we could see that one person’s excellence is not necessarily losing. Two people can be in the same place at the same time, and prizes are only one way of seeing.