Picking the best in online journalism

Here are the finalists for the 2009 Online Journalism Awards by the Online News Association.

Close to 100 sites are on the finalist list under dozens of award categories, from major news organization sites (bbcnews.com, nytimes.com, Wired.com, washingtonpost.com) to individual stories and multimedia presentations, all organized by topic and size.

Candidates for the Knight Award for Public Service include one site I've blogged about before, The Chauncey Bailey Project, named for -- and continuing the work of -- a former newsroom colleague of mine who was murdered while on the job in Oakland, Calif.

Other public service nominees are Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong at The Seattle Times, for Culture of Resistance, The Toronto Star, for Crime and Punishment, and The Wisconsin State Journal for Down to a Whisper: State's Native Languages Threatened with Loss.

ONA says many of the finalists are "pushing the envelope of innovation in digital storytelling and information sharing."

Student online journalism projects up for awards are:

Small Team

• Joy Lewis, Western Kentucky University, Sister Wife
• Lisa Pickoff-White, University of California, Berkeley, It Happens at Midnight

Large Team

• University of Miami School of Communication, Special Olympics Live
• NYCity News Service/City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, Election 2008: A Date with History
• UNC-Chapel Hill, Andaman Rising
• Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, South Africa: At the Crossroads of Hate and Hope

The winners will be announced at the 2009 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet on Oct. 3, at the Hilton San Francisco. The organization's partner in the awards is the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

More information about the awards, judging and organizations is available in the ONA press release.

Guiding journalists into social networking

The Journalist's Guide to Facebook is the latest in a series of compilations about online social networking for journalists at the "Social Media Guide" website called http://mashable.com.

Among the others (also listed at the end of the Facebook article) are:

• 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
• How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom
• 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy
• The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School

Speaking of online journalism, congratulations to the Roanoke Times (http://roanoke.com) for being cited by the Associated Press Managing Editors Awards in the "convergence" category for its interactive tour of new $66 million Taubman Museum of Art. The announcement is here on page 2 of the award story. (Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant's name is at the top of that page because she was a judge in another category of the competition, listed on the previous page.)