News awards are meant to promote journalistic professionalism and advocate cherished values or awareness. In reality, however, this might not always be the case. Based on a close study of the conferring of Taiwan's mainstream news awards, such as Zeng Xu-bai News Prize, Golden Tripod Prize, Vivian Wu Prize, Excellency for Journalism Prize, during the period of 1974-2013, this essay shows that the Year 2000 marks a watershed which implies changing professional roles for Taiwan journalists. Before 2000, reasons for conferring these awards actually promoted/advocated little, especially if compared with what got consciously conveyed by those awarded individual journalists in their self-portrait narratives and their respective awarded pieces. After 2000, the scenario began to change, as these awards tended to favor nonmainstream, alternative news media and professionals fighting for journalistic ideals and principles in an increasingly difficult environment. The conferring of news awards thus served as tokens of official supports and encouragements. With this contrast, the author explains the classical tensions between structure and agency as experienced by local journalists in their professional practices. Characterized by their respective socialization process, grass-root engagements and on-going self-reflections as conscious agents, individual journalists were inevitably caught in tensions and conflicts between their professional practices and structural constraints. News awards, being extensions of state political powers, symbolize such top-down structural constraints with specific regulatory mechanisms. The author therefore concludes that, until the structure itself changes and its grip loosened, such tensions would not be truly resolved.