Spanish websites claim top prizes at ONA awards

ELPAIS.com and Soitu.es claimed the first general excellence awards for non-English language sites at the Online News Association (ONA) 2008 awards on Saturday.

Speaking of ElPais.com, the judges said the site was ‘a shining example of how traditional media can blossom in the digital arena.’

“On a bedrock of first-class journalism it has built a brilliant suite of infographics that are rich in information, yet easy to consume,” they added in a press statement.

‘Bearing Witness‘, Reuters multimedia coverage of fallout from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, took the best multimedia feature award in the large sites category, while Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock was awarded the prize for outstanding use of digital technology by a small site.

A full list of the winners across the 23 awards and comments from the judges is available through the ONA awards website, but are listed in brief below:

Knight award for public service - WashingtonPost.com, Fixing D.C. Schools

General excellence (small site)- ArmyTimes.com

General excellence (medium site) - LasVegasSun.com

General excellence (large site) - CNN.com

General excellence, non-English (small site) - Soitu.es

General excellence, non-English (large site) - ELPAIS.com

Breaking news (medium site) - STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkwood shootings

Breaking news (large site) - NYTimes.com, Eliot Spitzer’s resignation

Investigative journalism (small site) - RecordOnline.com, The Times Herald Record (Middletown, N.Y.) “I Didn’t Do That Murder”: Lebrew Jones and the death of Micki Hall

Investigative journalism, (large site) - DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News, Unequal Justice, and The Globe and Mail, Talking to the Taliban

Multimedia feature (small site) - GEO.fr, Hidden World

Multimedia feature (medium sites) - STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Reporting for Duty

Multimedia feature (large site) - Reuters.com, Bearing Witness

Online commentary (small site) - Mark Fiore, MarkFiore.com, animated political cartoons

Online commentary (medium site) - The Bottom Line, DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News

Online commentary (large site) - God-O-Meter, Beliefnet.com

Online video presentation - OregonLive.com, The Oregonian, Living to the End

Outstanding use of digital technology (small site) - Everyblock.com

Outstanding use of digital technology (large site) - DesMoinesRegister.com, Iowa Caucuses

Specialty site journalism - WebMD

Student journalism - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill & Universidad de los Andes, South of Here, and Taylor Hayden, Western Kentucky University, Closer to Home: A Daughter Becomes Caregiver

Topical reporting (small sites) - Azstarnet.com, Arizona Daily Star, Immigration in the Spotlight

Topical reporting (large sites) - USAToday.com, Today in the Sky

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Conference tweets: live from two international journalism events

We’re a little bit sad here at Journalism.co.uk towers that we didn’t get to go to either of this week’s major journalism conferences, the Global International Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Lillehammer, Norway and the Online News Association (ONA) in Washington DC.

But we got our web feelers out and collated these Twitters for your perusal.

Over at the ONA Twitter Search you can follow the Poynter Group, who are all twittering madly (you’ll need to create yourself an account to log in) and you can see the tweets from the first session of the morning here. The ONA has put together information about the Twitterers, discussion groups and podcasts here.

Or follow blogger supremo Pat Thornton, who was a little bit bored this afternoon…

Meanwhile over GIJC Twitterland we picked up this Tweet about Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Hajj –  imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years.

We’ll be back with a better summary of the conferences’ outcomes next week, when we’ve spoken to a few more participants.

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ONA 2008 Awards: new categories reflect developments in online news

The Online News Association has made changes to the 2008 Online Journalism Awards, including the introduction of two new categories.

General Excellence in Online Journalism - Non English and Online Video Presentation have been introduced as award categories in response to the many developments within online news since 2000, when the awards began.

The former applies to non-English sites anywhere in the world to expand the scope of the awards, and the latter rewards excellence in video journalism original to the web.

There is now be a total of 12 awards covering a wide range of categories from niche sites to investigative journalism.

The deadline for all entries is May 31.

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