...and the winners are...(and other notes)

Buffalo.com photo by Darleen Stry.

...well, I will preface this by saying that the overall winner of the Spotted Spring photo contest was Darleen Stry's gallery, Spring is Here.

The next two runner-ups were Bill Parker's Signs of Spring in WNY gallery, and Tom Kuenzi's Sprung!! gallery. Both Bill and Tom's galleries received the same number of votes from our photo interns.

Now, I know I said that the top two vote-getters would get the gift certificates - but maybe it's the sun in the sky, or the fresh smell of cut grass in the air, or being too lazy to figure out a tie-breaker...but I think both these gentlemen deserve a gift certificate.

Therefore, all three of our contestants - Darleen, Bill, and Tom - will receive a $25 gift certificate to a local restaurant for their troubles. Thank you for the photos!

I am open to more contests, and ideas for contests, amongst our interns...please share your ideas with me and I will be happy to help promote anything which spurs interest in our Spotted internship.

• This leads me to another topic that I've been meaning to address.
  
  I feel like I have been a bit of a grump with all of you in the program lately, and I do not mean to be. If you are reading this blog, odds are good that you are one of the people who are genuinely interested, active, and involved in the Buffalo.com internship program. You're not the people I want to be grumpy with. You're the people who I want to be happy!
  
  Unfortunately, we have been losing interns lately, either to attrition or other commitments, and it's been more difficult to get people out to as many events.
  
  Plus, due to some pretty major new projects that we will be rolling out this summer, we have been unable to do a lot of intern recruiting. We've also been unable to be as hands-on with the program as we have been in the past ("we" meaning Deanna and me). This will be worth it in the long run - there are some very cool things coming down the pipe in the near future - but it means that, for the long-term health of the site, things have suffered some in the short-term. I completely acknowledge this state of affairs.
  
  I do want to say thank you to everyone who has stuck with the program - we haven't had a lot of new blood in the last 6 months, so the people out shooting or writing stories are people who have been committed to the program for more than their required term of service, that's for sure. Please hang around...good stuff is on the way.
  
  
• In another blog post, Dan Ruggiero raised a great point - there has not been a lot of diversity on Spotted in the last year or so. Buffalo has a fairly diverse community, and a lot of our events really seem to focus on specific events in specific parts of the city or region.
  
  I agree with Dan completely on this point, and this is something that we want to change this summer. I think this is very doable. That being said, I will reiterate my request from a week ago - to grow as photographers and writers, to grow as a Web site, for that matter, we need to step outside of our comfort zone from time to time. We need become more representative of Western New York. I have some ideas on how to make this happen, and I will take a lead in making sure this is, indeed, the case.