We also decided an award would not be given if the judges felt no single extraordinary title had been published during the year. The Printz will be announced at ALA's annual Midwinter Conference, which takes place this year in San Antonio, Texas, at the same press conference the Newbery and all the other major awards are announced. We hope it will come to have the same weight as the other major library prizes, too, with the author featured on TV and the book discussed in the press and around the country. I doubt any of this will happen in the first year, but a publicity fund to help get the word out does exist, and I feel optimistic about press response. The committee agreed on rules to reflect the diversity of YA readers and books, but when we decided that the Printz Award would be a prize for literary distinction, the rubber hit the road.
Popularity is a measure of how many people like something.
It treats the teen peer group in the most generalized terms and assumes that the literature that speaks to the most teens about the most common teen experiences is the best. Advocates of the importance of popularity see this measure as the voice of the people and a check against the imposition of adult values on teen readers. In practice, however, concern with popularity is the opposite of respect for teens. Instead, it causes art to be judged on the basis of unexpressed, untested adult assumptions. I think intimacy, almost the opposite of popularity, is really the key to literary distinction.