Thursday, September 13, 2007

orlandosentinel.com Online journalism is cooler than ever, but does it still make sense to give it separate awards?

Yesterday the Online News Association unveiled this year's crop of finalists for its annual online journalism awards. Winners will be announced Oct. 19 at ONA's conference in Toronto.

It's a pretty impressive group -- from the Orlando Sentinel's multimedia, interactive coverage of a Feb. 2 spate of deadly tornadoes to NewWest's outdoor blog by "Wild Bill" Schneider, to the Council on Foreign Relations. I'm glad to see the range of traditional and nontraditional news organizations represented.

As I perused the finalists' work, I recalled a conversation I had with Knight Digital Media Center director Vikki Porter last Saturday at Stanford, just before we both took the stage on a plenary panel at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Just a few days before SEJ had announced its own slew of awards for environmental reporting -- which includes an "online" category. This year's online SEJ awards winners were:

• 1st place: Center for Public Integrity's Takings Initiatives Accountability Project
• 2nd place: Greenwire's Sustainable Design: The Growing Green Movement

Vikki noted, about journalism awards in general: "Why do we even have an 'online' category?" This seemed to have her a bit agitated, so I called her today to follow up. She elaborated:

"If you go back and really take a look at the Pulitzer Prizes, it was a bit of an 'Aha!' moment. They've 'let' online and multimedia pieces be added to the prizes and entries.

"Journalists who are doing some of the best work, including in SEJ, have figured out how much of a story they can tell online. Most of the award winners were basically doing online journalism. Even if their stories were narratives, I had to read them in an online environment.

"If we're going to say this our most exemplary work, then these awards should be about the journalism. Why should the medium matter? To me, we're at a point where if we want to preserve good journalism, we should stop worrying about platform and start judging content's value as journalism."

...For more perspectives on journalism awards, see this LinkedIn discussion.

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