We’re looking for two creator-focused brands to partner with us on a new show about awards and recognition.
Each partner will be featured across our channels from day one and positioned in front of an audience of award enthusiasts, content creators, and marketing leaders who care about recognition, credibility, and standing out.
The show is led by a podcast strategist and producer with nearly a decade of industry experience, with past work including Indeed, Ligue 1, Brain Games, and HBS.
Want more details? Email hello@recognized.fm or reach out on LinkedIn.
A collection of useful resources for researching, comparing, and navigating awards and recognition programs, including databases, guides, and other resources for creators, professionals, and organizations.
Interviews I’ve done about awards, recognition, credibility, and the bigger question of whether winning actually creates value.
- Why Podcast and Creator Awards Matter: A discussion about the role and relevance of podcast and creator awards, and what recognition actually means to independent audio.
- Are Podcast Awards Worth It?: A breakdown of the return on entering podcast awards, and which of the industry’s biggest honours are worth the submission fee.
- Do the Game Awards Matter?: A discussion about the role and relevance of game awards, and what recognition actually means in the gaming industry.
A curated resource for podcasters, bringing together great examples, useful tools, smart articles, podcast jobs, and the things worth knowing if you’re serious about audio.
Plus consulting and strategy services when you want help with your podcast, and podcast-ready domains for whatever you’re building next.
- Microphones Wiki: A growing catalogue of podcast microphones, brands, and the equipment worth knowing about.
- Podcast Directory: A directory of companies, platforms, and services across the podcasting industry.
- Reading: Articles, ideas, and rabbit holes worth exploring across audio, podcasting, awards, and the business around them.
- Domains: Podcast-ready domains for creators looking for a name for their next show, project, or idea.
Articles, interviews, and outside coverage of podcasting, awards, and recognition.
- Frank Racioppi, is a Forbes contributor who writes about podcasting, indie recognition, and awards. He also publishes Ear Worthy, his own podcast newsletter and has quoted Recognized.fm in his Forbes coverage, and is the founder of the Ear Worthy Awards.
- Podnews: The Podcast Show reveals full speaker list. Our podcast taxonomy was featured by Podnews in its coverage of The Podcast Show London.
Our writing and research exploring awards, recognition, credibility, and the business built around them.
Places where people who give, receive, study, and discuss recognition come together.
- r/Recognition. A subreddit covering every major award category from the Olympics to Michelin stars, its cross category scope surfaces patterns that single fandom subs never see.
- Recognition Professionals International. A trade association for people who design recognition programmes, it exists because giving awards is a paid profession with its own standards.
Official and primary sources for researching awards, winners, nominees, judges, rules, categories, and past results.
- Michelin Guide. Created by the French tyre company Michelin and built around anonymous inspectors, the Guide has expanded into new destinations through partnerships with tourism organizations. Documented agreements include about $880,000 per year from Thailand and $1.8 million over five years from South Korea. Michelin maintains that its restaurant selections are independently determined by its inspectors. (Eater, Michelin)
- Guinness World Records. The world’s most famous record-keeping organization has built a business around helping people and brands become officially recognized. Individuals can apply through the standard process, while paid options can speed up applications, and businesses can access fee-based consultancy services around their record attempts.
- Academy Awards Database. Published by the Academy itself and complete through March 2026, it is the rare case where the awarding body maintains the full public record, speeches included.
- Emmy Awards Database. Run by the Television Academy, it is authoritative precisely because it states which Emmys it excludes, which catches a claim most reporting gets wrong.
- Grammy Awards Database. Run by the Recording Academy, its per category and per year URL structure lets you trace a single category across 67 years without leaving the official source.
- BAFTA Awards Archive. Run by BAFTA, it is one of the few official records covering video games alongside film and television.
- Pulitzer Prizes Archive. Run by the Pulitzer board, it publishes the nominating jurors by name and year, which almost no other prize does.
- The Booker Library. Run by the Booker Prize Foundation, it names each year’s judges and documents its own rule failures, with the working papers held at Oxford Brookes.
- Nobel Prize Nomination Archive. Run by the Nobel Foundation under a 50 year secrecy rule, it is the only source showing who was considered and passed over.
- World Press Photo Archive. Run by the foundation itself, it publishes its own disqualifications and a self audit of the archive’s gaps, which is the strongest available signal of good faith.
- Internet Broadway Database. Run by the Broadway League’s research department, it puts awards, grosses, and attendance on the same production page.
- IMDb Awards Central. Owned by Amazon and partly user maintained, it is a fast cross award lookup and nothing more, so confirm anything it tells you.
- Wikipedia list of awards. Wikipedia award articles across arts, sport, science, business and public service.
Awards built around failure, unusual achievements, strange categories, or outcomes nobody particularly wants to celebrate
- Ig Nobel Prizes. Created by Marc Abrahams at Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels celebrate research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. Its archive links each winner to the underlying research, turning an unusual award into a rabbit hole of real science.
- Loo of the Year Awards. Running since 1987, the awards turn something most people take for granted into a formal recognition program for washroom standards. Entrants pay for an inspection and grading, with facilities assessed against established criteria and awarded grades ranging from Bronze to Diamond. It is a fun example of how almost anything can become a measurable standard, a credential, and an award.
- Golden Raspberry Awards. Founded by John J.B. Wilson and Mo Murphy, the Razzies created an entirely different kind of film recognition by celebrating movies and performances that stood out for the wrong reasons. What began as a small alternative to traditional awards has become a recognizable part of Hollywood’s awards culture.
- Darwin Awards. Founded by Wendy Northcutt in 1993, the Darwin Awards turned extraordinary real-life stories into their own form of recognition. Its long-running archive shows how a memorable concept and a compelling story can create an awards category unlike almost any other.
Sources for researching sports records, sanctions, rulings, athletes, contracts, and the systems behind recognition in sport.
- USADA Sanctions List. Published by the US Anti-Doping Agency, it links each sanction to its press release and full arbitration decision, and it discloses when it deletes names.
- Court of Arbitration for Sport. Run by sport’s own appellate body, it holds the reasoning behind doping, nationality, and judging rulings, though most ordinary cases stay confidential.
- Athletics Integrity Unit Global List. Published by athletics’ own integrity body, it gives sanction length and the exact period of disqualified results, which is what you need to void a record.
- US Center for SafeSport Database. Run by the congressionally created Center, it is the single searchable register of abuse and misconduct sanctions across US Olympic sport.
- Olympedia. Built by a group of Olympic historians called the OlyMADmen, it holds biographical and results data on every Olympic athlete, well past what the IOC publishes.
- Sports Reference and Stathead. Founded by Sean Forman in 2000, its finders answer the question no other source can: has this ever happened before.
- Spotrac and Over the Cap. Two independent private trackers, they are worth using together because their disagreements reveal how contracts are actually being accounted for.
- Transfermarkt. A German site running on crowd submitted valuations, it is reliable for transfer fees and contract dates and unreliable for the market values it is usually quoted for.
Tools and archives for finding historical records, financial information, deleted pages, public filings, and other hard-to-find evidence.
- Wayback Machine. Run by the Internet Archive, it holds over 1 trillion pages, so it recovers the rule change, winner list, or press release that was quietly edited or deleted.
- ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Built by a newsroom on top of IRS filings, it exposes what award foundations actually pay their executives.
- OpenSecrets. Run by a nonprofit that absorbed the National Institute on Money in Politics, it remains the best lobbying and donor interface even though its API closed on April 15, 2025.
- National Archives Catalog API. Built by NARA, it is a read and write interface to primary federal records including OCR text, which few archives expose.
- Chronicling America. Hosted by the Library of Congress, it is the only free route into American newspaper coverage of awards before 1964.
