2024-25 Offerings

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2024-25 Third Coast Competition Offerings

At Third Coast, we’re committed to maintaining the excellence of our annual independent awards program, unique to the industry in its breadth, history and judging process, where we bring together talented makers in the field to select the Third Coast Winners in each category and to inform our Third Coast Finalists (who are ultimately selected by the in-house Third Coast Listening Team)!

For the 2024-25 Third Coast Competition, our first independent Competition Cycle, we’re dedicated to maintaining the integrity of our traditional Competition, while we rebuild. Here’s what we’re offering.

For All Entrants:

  • Access to our collectively priced rates, including lower rates for self-funded makers and the “We Need Third Coast” Flash Sale Deadline
  • Entry into an internal Third Coast Database that keeps a record of entry evaluation, tags for genre, tone, subject matter, and producer information
  • The guarantee of having your work heard by at least one Third Coast staff member, and the possibility of being heard by a panel of peer judges
  • Notification of entry status from a Third Coast staff member

For Third Coast Winners:

  • A handcrafted award
  • Inclusion in our 2024-25 digital Competition showcase
  • Recognition on social media
  • A featured acceptance speech at our 2025 Third Coast Awards Celebration

For Third Coast Finalists:

  • Inclusion in our 2024-25 digital Competition showcase
  • Recognition on social media

Our Process

A Culture of Listening

As a Competition staff, we listen to every single entry that comes in through the Competition. After an extensive process of reviewing the work, we determine a final group of entries in each category that we share with a small cohort of peer judges: members of the audio industry whose own perspectives combine with our listening values to ultimately determine our annual Award-winners in every category. These decisions are made through a series of facilitated conversations, what we hope is a powerful experience for the peer judges to deepen their critical listening skills and deepen connections with one another. We are working on ways of sharing that unique process of judging, and insights from the judges themselves, in our showcase of standout work.

Listening is not a science, nor does it come with an objective rubric for evaluation. But cultivating a practice of deep listening is part of our mission as an organization. At the same time, our work is founded on challenging — and eliminating — barriers to entry, which come along with a call for entries to a competition. There’s a tension there that maybe we can never fully resolve, but that’s the project we embark on year after year.

Here is some insight into our goals, as Third Coast staff members, when we take on the great responsibility of listening. (We also offer these values to our selected judges as guidance.) Through evaluating work entered to the Competition, we hope to:

  • Create a meaningful snapshot of the world in audio by challenging the past, igniting the future, and disrupting the status quo
  • Build an engine for our year-round programming and for uplifting BIPOC producers and historically marginalized subjects
  • Reach a wider, more global audience than ever before, and showcase audio storytelling that truly comes from across the globe

Beyond Competing

We take careful notes to learn about you and your work, compiling a database of entries and entrants, a comprehensive reflection of the work and makers we hear from. We also include questions on our entry form that help us to gauge how accessible our current programming is for entrants, and where more support is needed. We carefully track all answers.

As our staff listens, we search for patterns and themes that reflect the most urgent topics in narrative audio storytelling, which in turn shapes these programs. We seek inspiring and innovative approaches from producers, who we sometimes follow-up directly about other opportunities, programs and collaborations.

This data is critical to us. Listening to your work and more deeply understanding the field allows us to create a new kind of “engine for programming” at Third Coast. Our goal is that through the independent Third Coast Competition, we can actually use this information to build new field-building programs for entrants, like feedback opportunities, residencies, mentorship programs, collective pricing rates, and maker sessions and live events. If you want to help Third Coast make this a reality, please reach out to us: info@thirdcoastfestival.org.