This year’s Walkleys deadline was meant to close on Monday August 31 at 5pm. But at the last minute, thedeadline was changed to midnight.

Four Corners’ ”Price of Convenience” 7 Eleven expose aired on August 31 at 8.30pm. Work submitted to the Walkleys has to be produced in the period September 1, 2014, to August 31, 2015, but by the 5pm deadline, Four Cornershadn’t yet aired. One rumour doing the rounds is that the Walkley Foundation moved the deadline to give Four Corners the ability to submit the episode before the midnight deadline (though producers would have had to do it the very night the episode aired).

But the Walkleys tells us the deadline was moved for the same reason it’s been moved every year since 2012. “The deadline was moved as we had a huge amount of activity on the entry site and causing it to crash. To ensure that everyone was able to get their entries into the system and not to miss out simply because our server couldn’t handle the load we extended the deadline to midnight”, Walkley awards and marketing manager Lauren Dixon told us. “Unfortunately journalists love a deadline and all try to enter at the same time (right on deadline) and this causes technical problems.”

It’s not clear whether Four Corners entered the episode in the competition, though we’ll find out if it’s a finalist soon enough. There were 1362 entries to the Walkleys this year. Four Corners has an enviable record at the awards — it scored three Walkleys last year, including the Gold Walkley for the Banking Bad episode, which, like the Price of Convenience, was a collaboration between the ABC and Fairfax. — Myriam Robin