Third Coast Competition Frequently Asked Questions

There is no limit to how many entries you can enter into our Competition, as long as each entry meets the category requirements and the eligibility window of April 2, 2022 - March 20, 2025 (or, for the Audio Unbound category: April 2, 2021 - March 20, 2025).

Each story within a program that presents multiple stories should be submitted as a separate entry (such as stories within typical episodes of All Things Considered or Snap Judgment, or acts within This American Life). We suggest entering your strongest stories, and if any of them wins a prize, the show will be recognized, too.

Please don’t! While we all love a good trailer for a series or a show, we don’t currently consider trailers to be eligible for any of our categories.

Yes, but we don’t necessarily recommend it. Third Coast seeks to award stories in their fullest form. There are some exceptions, but a general rule of thumb is that any excerpted story should still stand alone on its own, and, as stated in the question above, should not serve as a trailer for the piece of work in its fullest form.

Yes, provided that it meets the eligibility requirements of each category and that you submit any necessary additional information for each category alongside your entry. Please read through the descriptions and requirements for each category on their respective pages.

Yes, you can. The bottom line is that at Third Coast, we are interested in narrative audio storytelling in all its forms, and we seek to blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction. While we don’t explicitly have a category for fictional work, we do believe that fictional storytelling, or fictional elements in non-fiction storytelling, can be powerful tools for demonstrating truth, documenting lived experience, and translating the past, present, and future into sound. If you are interested in the connections between fiction and documentary, and if you are willing to articulate those connections to us in the written sections of your entry, we very much think your work has a place in our Competition.

Yes, as long as this specific entry fits into our window of eligibility and has not previously been honored as either a Winner or Finalist in the Third Coast Competition. (For further clarification about those cases, see the FAQ questions “Can I enter work that has won previous awards and prizes?” and “May I enter the same piece two years in a row if it was honored as a Third Coast Winner or Finalist the year before?”)

In order for a piece to be eligible for this year’s Call for Entries, it must have first been presented publicly on a podcast, broadcast, online, or in a public setting (including, but not limited to, a theater, gallery, museum, classroom, event space, etc.) between April 2, 2022 - March 20, 2025, or, for Audio Unbound, April 2, 2021 - March 20, 2025. Repeat entries have won awards on their second submission attempt in the past.

If you’re not sure whether or not a piece you’re interested in entering has already been honored by Third Coast as a Winner or Finalist, or if you’re still confused about whether or not your work is eligible, please reach out to us for clarification.

Yes, so long as the work has previously won an award from a different organization, and has not won a Third Coast Award already. If you have previously entered a piece of work that was recognized as a Winner or Finalist in the Third Coast Competition, we ask that you not enter it to our Call for Entries again.

If you’re still confused about whether or not your work is eligible, please reach out to us for clarification.

No. If a piece in the Third Coast Competition has been honored as either an Award-Winner or a Finalist, that piece can’t be entered to future Calls for Entry, even if the piece is otherwise eligible. We make this distinction and ask you not to re-submit a piece that has already been honored in our competition for a few reasons:

Our goal is always to honor a broad and diverse range of work from across the audio industry. Honoring an individual piece as a Winner or Finalist only once is one way we stick to that mandate. We’ve always always said that Award-Winning pieces in our competition are no longer eligible to win another Award in our competition – now, that’s true for Finalists as well: if a piece has already been named as a Finalist, it is no longer eligible to be recognized as a Finalist or Award-Winner (and vice versa!)

Remember that while you cannot enter the same individual piece of work that has already been recognized as an Award-Winner or Finalist in the Third Coast Competition, you are more than welcome — in fact, you’re encouraged — to enter other work! We always want to hear more work from makers, no matter how many times they have previously entered or been recognized in our Competition. Also, if the piece you received recognition for from our Competition is one episode or series from a show, podcast, or project that continues to produce new work, we welcome other pieces (whether those are individual episodes or series) from that same show, podcast or project.

If you’re not sure whether or not a piece you’re interested in entering has already been honored by Third Coast as a Winner or Finalist, or if you’re still confused about whether or not your work is eligible, please reach out to us for clarification.

Yes! While we do not hand out repeat honors for a single piece of work, we do not have any rules against giving honors to a producer or team who have previously won an award for a new piece of work they’ve created.

Yes!

Yes! But please REMOVE ANY ADS that aren't part of the work itself. See the question in the “Preparing Entries” section below regarding ad removal requirements and specifications.

Not at all! We welcome work that has not been broadcast or greenlit by an outlet or show. We require all work to have been published publicly, and that includes self-publication (e.g. on a personal Soundcloud or a similar hosting site.)

Winners will be notified before all other entrants in the late summer or fall of 2025. All other entrants will be notified shortly thereafter.

We'll announce the winners publicly in the fall of 2025, but won't reveal which specific award they've won until the 2025 Awards Celebration.

Yes, but please note that you will need detailed information about each entry. If you don’t have this information readily available, you may need to contact the maker or team.

And you should never submit any piece of work without the explicit consent of its creators.

Over the years we noticed that, again and again, the pieces submitted to the Skylarking category were strongly considered by the judges in the Best Documentary, and as the field — and our Competition — expanded, the lines of Skylarking were starting to become blurred, even for us! So we put a pause on the category in 2020, with the knowledge that we’ll carry the intention (and the history) of the category into our critical dialogue within the Competition. (Many thanks to Ira.) If you were considering submitting your piece into Skylarking, please consider submitting into one of the other categories.

Your audio work should be published by the Late Deadline of March 20, 2025.

Yes! Just email us at competition@thirdcoastfestival.org with your correction, and we'll make sure to update your entry to reflect it.

All entries submitted to the Competition are automatically considered for Directors’ Choice.

There is no limit to the number of categories into which you can enter a single piece, and there is no penalty for submitting a piece incorrectly into a category where it is not eligible. If you aren’t sure if your entry is eligible for a particular category — even after reading the category descriptions — go ahead and enter the category anyway. As part of our advocacy work within the Call for Entries, the Third Coast staff will consider your entry in whichever category(s) that it fits into, and we will advocate for it to be heard in whatever category it will be the most competitive. We're rooting for you! (And we would never move your entry into a category that would make it less competitive.)

Certain categories are determined by the length of your entry, so be sure to check the individual category eligibility pages. Best Documentary: Short entries must be shorter than 10 minutes. Best Documentary entries must be 10-75 minutes long. Best Serialized Story entries are longer than 75 minutes and broken apart into multiple episodes, with a total length of under 15 hours. Audio Unbound entries must be shorter than 5 hours. Best News Feature entries must be under 30 minutes long (which we’ve increased from 20 minutes in past years)!

Other categories do not have time-based requirements.

Once you finish checking out on our entry form, you should reach a page on the form that reads: “Submission Successful: Thank you for entering the 2024-025 Third Coast Competition!” Shortly thereafter, you should receive a confirmation email, including a receipt, to the contact email you submitted your entry with. (Make sure you check your spam!) If you don’t receive this email within 24 hours and you believe that youcompleted the submission process, please reach out to us directly.

Third Coast annually curates and personally invites groups of experts in the industry to serve as Judges for the Third Coast Competition. Judges are selected from a diverse pool of experienced makers, editors, journalists, and more to represent a breadth of perspectives and approaches to audio storytelling. We will announce the Judges for the 2024-25 Competition in 2025!

Don’t worry — this comes up often. We ask anyone judging work to be honest in disclosing any ties they have to entries during the judging process. If a Third Coast staff member or Judge has participated in the creation of an entry or believes they are too close to the entry for another reason, they are asked to recuse themselves from any discussion that might influence the decision-making process.

You are still able to enter this work according to our Board Member Competition Entry Policy. Through this process, we are committed to remaining transparent, and ensuring that the involvement of a Third Coast Board Member in the creation of an entry does not affect or compromise its status in our Competition in any way. All of our current Board Members are aware of this policy as well. If you would like to read the policy in full, please reach out.

Decide which categories you’d like to enter, and make sure you're eligible for them. Then, check out the detailed checklist of what you’ll need to prepare for each category on its category page. (Some categories have specific requirements, such as transcripts, written statements, or additional documentation.)

All categories require: at least one audio file, a description of the entry, full credits, and an entry fee.

No, no, and no. (And don’t worry, a lot of people get confused about this!) Generally speaking, the rule is to cut out any promotional material (unless that’s somehow part of the story) and any host-read ledes or credits that aren’t essential to understanding the story itself.

Yes. We prefer .mp3 files for digital storage, but there are no penalties for submitting .wav file(s).

Thanks for asking! If possible, we’d appreciate it if each file that you’re uploading is less than 100 MB.

Yes, we love subtitled videos! Please include the link in the "Entry Summary" field. Alternatively, if you run out of space in the Entry Summary, you can add a page or paragraph to your transcript PDF with a link to the video.

Our rates are broken down into three length-based tiers: entries shorter than 75 minutes, entries between 75 minutes and 7 hours, and entries between 7 hours and 15 hours. Within each tier, we ask entrants to consider who is paying for the entry and the financial means of that person or organization. In general, the “Access Rate” is reserved for individuals in need of an affordable fee option, particularly individuals who would not otherwise be able to afford to enter the competition. We ask that institutions covering the costs of entries on behalf of employees, students, or other associated makers, pay at least the “True Cost” rate. We ask that for-profit institutions select the “For-Profit” rate to help cover the cost of lowering barriers of access for folks paying the Access Rate. Your honesty and thoughtful participation in Collective Pricing enables us to better understand today’s audio landscape, and how makers are supported in entering our programs.

In addition, as a U.S.-based organization, we are committed to actively making more room in the independent Third Coast Competition for non-English work, as well as for submissions from outside the U.S. and from around the globe. Therefore, we offer a separate sliding scale of entry fees in order to better meet the significant financial barriers that may come along with producing and entering non-English language work, as well as work being made in certain countries outside of the U.S. that have lower GDPs per capita. Our goal is to better meet the needs of this important work that often requires more labor and cost to submit than English-language entries.

To read more about the entry rates, see the Entry Rates Breakdown, or continue to the entry form.

No. You can only pay for one entry at a time for the 2024-25 Third Coast Call for Entries.

While you can submit as many total entries as you’d like to the Third Coast Competition, you can only submit one entry per form this year. That means you’ll only pay for one entry per completed form. You are encouraged to enter as many times as you’d like.

We use this information to help us maintain and improve upon our Collective Pricing model.

While we rely on income from entry rates to help us fund Competition administration & operations, price should not be a barrier to entry.

No matter when you enter, if you are an international entrant from a country not included on the list of top 30 countries by GDP, the entry form will give you the option to select a discount of 10%, 25%, 50%, or 75% from your total entry cost. For example, if you are entering one entry at the Access Rate and one serialized story at the Access Rate, and you select a 75% discount, your total cost would be ($100 + $40) x 0.25 = $35.

If you live in one of the top 30countries by GDP and need a further reduction of your entry fee, please contact us: competition@thirdcoastfestival.org.

Sorry to hear that! We’ve tried to streamline the submission form as much as possible, but we know that technology (and we) are not perfect. If you’re having technical issues with the form that you can’t resolve, please email us (competition@thirdcoastfestival.org) and we’ll help find a solution.

This agreement does a couple of things: First, it provides Third Coast with the right to showcase your work in our programming. This includes sharing your entry in its entirety during live events (either virtual or in-person); on the Third Coast website; in social media, our newsletter, and on other marketing platforms in association with the Third Coast Competition. It does not take away your ownership of the piece, nor does it grant Third Coast the right to publish the entry on podcast or the radio. You’ll be notified if we choose to highlight your piece in one of these ways. In the case that your entry is chosen as a Winner or Finalist, we may ask you to sign a more comprehensive agreement that grants us the right to publish on radio & podcast.

Second, the agreement allows Third Coast to advocate for your entry in discussions, including by moving your entry into a category where it might be more competitive.

Finally, the agreement asks that you keep us up-to-date with all changes in your contact information, and gives us permission to reach out to you directly with questions about your work.

For now, not much: Our goal is to maintain the excellence of the Third Coast Award-Winners, Finalists & Judging Process. But going independent also means that we have a lot more freedom. And that’s really important to us.

For years, we’ve worked with a Third Coast Listening Team to review every single entry we receive, taking careful notes about you and your work, compiling a database of entries and entrants. We’re also constantly adding questions to our entry form to better understand you and the work you do, and how we can support you throughout your career.

We’re working toward a model where this process is a powerful engine for field building programs that we can offer to as many entrants as possible. This includes: residencies, feedback opportunities, mentorship programs, more collective pricing options, maker sessions. We see the Call for Entries as an entry point to a robust, year-round dialogue with all entrants, who we hope to support over the arc of their careers.

Enter your work! And consider partnering with Third Coast! We’re looking for institutional partners and individual supporters. If you’d like to be one of them, get in touch: info@thirdcoastfestival.org.