The UBC Graduate School of Journalism was a runner-up in the Online Video Journalism (small site category).

Here is the full list of winners:

Knight Award for Public Service
Barnegat Bay Under Stress – Asbury Park Press

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Large Site
BBC News

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Medium Site
The Globe and Mail

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small Site
voiceofsandiego.org – Voice of San Diego

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Micro Site
NJ Spotlight

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Small Site
OWNI

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Large Site
LA NACION

Breaking News, Large Site
Coverage of the uprisings in Egypt – Al Jazeera

Breaking News, Small Site
A Snow Storm Hits New York and WNYC Listeners Map the Cleanup – WNYC Radio

Specialty Site Journalism, Affiliated
NPR Music – NPR (Tie)

Pipeline – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/post-gazette.com (Tie)

Specialty Site Journalism, Independent
edweek.org – Education Week, Editorial Projects in Education

Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Large Site
Breach of Faith – Los Angeles Times

Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Small Site
Dialysis – ProPublica

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Large Site
Traumatic Brain Injury: Coming home a different person – The Washington Post

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Medium Site
Exile Without End: Palestinians in Lebanon – CBC News, Radio-Canada, ALT Digital Design Studio

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Small Site
Crisis Guide: Pakistan – Council on Foreign Relations / MediaStorm

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Student Site
Global Warning – Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Large Site
CNN Belief Blog – CNN Digital

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Medium Site
Ward Room – NBCChicago.com

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Small Site
OpenSecrets.org

Online Commentary/Blogging, Large Site
Arianna Huffington – The Huffington Post

Online Commentary/Blogging, Medium Site
No award

Online Commentary/Blogging, Small
No award

Outstanding Informational Graphic or Data Visualization, Professional
Tell-All Telephone – Zeit Online

Outstanding Informational Graphic or Data Visualization, Student
No award

Online Video Journalism, Large Site
Caught in the Crossfire: Victims of Gang Violence – Los Angeles Times

Online Video Journalism, Medium Site
Exile Without End: Palestinians in Lebanon – CBC News, Radio-Canada, ALT Digital Design Studio

Online Video Journalism, Small Site
Powering a Nation: Spilling Over – UNC News21

Online Video Journalism, Student
Haiti’s Lost Children – University of Miami (Tie)

Now What Argentina? – University of North Carolina & Universidad Pontifica de Argentina(Tie)

Community Collaboration
The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan

The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Journalism
Flipboard

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Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves.

She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist these days is futile. Instead she paraphrased Warhol saying in the future everyone will be a journalist for 15 minutes.

Looking ahead, she said journalism has many futures - as a business, as a profession, as a process – and we are only at the start.

She recapped how some of the previous arguments about journalism tended to frame the future negatively, such as a future dominated by the “hamster wheel” of live coverage and technologists.

Bell argued we tended to see disruption and technology as a bad thing. But in her view, these factors favour good journalism.

“It feels like journalism has been in defence mode for a long time and is now breaking out of its boundaries,” she said, suggesting journalism can learn from other disciplines.

For her, the future of journalism is about understanding technologies and the platforms that support it.

Talking about her journalism students who use technology in their reporting, Bell argued that how to tell stories best is no longer in the hands of technologists, but in the hands of journalists.

She suggested that one emerging core skill is how to make the best of collaboration between journalists, technologists and beyond.

Another idea she contested is that instant journalism is bad journalism. Instead she said the social, real-time web and proliferation of mobile devices had been one of the galvanising elements in journalism.

“Live journalism isn’t hamster journalism,” she insisted.

The live stream of journalism, the use of free tools and the involvement of people who are not journalists per se, is making journalism better, she argued.

Her most controversial point was about the funding of journalism. In her view, revenues and profits did not equate with good journalism.

Now, she said, the primary focus of those involved in journalism is sustainability.

She quoted the example of the Journal Register company with its focus on experimenting with digital, open approaches to journalism. But, she continued, there is uncertainty about whether the experimentation will work.

She also cited ProPublica as an example of what can be done when we go beyond the way we have traditionally thought of journalism.

“There is no clear answer to what a news organisation will look like in five year’s time,” said Bell. “The future of journalism is there to be defined, we have all the right conditions.”

She concluded by insisting that we have a collective capacity to make this all work, but this can only be done by looking outwards and looking at other disciplines.

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Her move to ITV News in September has raised questions over who “owns” the almost 60,000 people who follow @BBCLauraK.

The Guardian suggests that “rather than handing her old account login back to the BBC to start from scratch with a new ITV account, the sensible thing to do is to change the name of the account.”

But it looks like Kuenssberg will be starting from scratch, with the Twitter handle, @ITVLauraK.

Ironically, the announcement was made by Kuenssberg on her BBC Twitter account.

Social media creates an opportunity for journalists to interact on a personal level with audiences.

Even if an account is branded as a “BBC” journalist, it blurs the traditional barrier between the professional and personal as tweets tend to reflect the personality of the reporter.

It marks a further step in the shift from the institutional to the individual brand of the journalist, identified by the State of the Media report in 2009:

Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand.

Social media provides journalists with a way to connect and interact with audiences in a more personal and direct way than through traditional news products.

But there is an unresolved tension between the journalist and the institution, especially on Twitter, which as Jemima Kiss points out, is designed for individuals to communicate.

Media institutions may have to accept that they cannot own the Twitter accounts of their reporters.  The journalist may need to switch to a new account, as Kuenssberg will be doing, but they are likely to take their following with them.

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While quoting some of the bad news in the annual State of the Media report for 2011, Schiller outlined seven reasons to be cheerful:

1. Conditions finally right to give paywalls a fair shake. What has changed, she said is that while scale still matters, brand is back. The other thing is that you can train people to pay for content, arguing iTunes has shown this is possible. She also points to the growing popularity of tablets.
2. Local is still up for grabs. Schiller said legacy media can win the battle for local audiences as they have the people and brands. But she questioned whether legacy media would make the investment.
3. Twitter as a newsgathering vehicle. She cited Andy Carvin’s curated feed of Twitter, saying it was an extraordinary and powerful complement to what a news organisation regularly does.
4. Apps are the “holy grail of engagement”. The duplication of those who download NPR’s app and listen to NPR on the radio is massive, she said. 80% of Android app users are NPR listeners.  People who listen to audio consume 10 times as much content as those who just read, Schiller said.
5. Audience acquisition. The web is not dead, said Schiller, stressing the the browser is the best way to acquire news users. Only 20% of NPR.org users listen to NPR radio. “Do not give up on the web.”
6. Legacy news organisations are ready to be their own disruptors. So rather than being platform agnostic, news organisations have realised they have to serve every audience in different ways depending on platform.. Schiller cites examples of news organisations creating new brands such as Washington Post’s Trove and The Daily.
7. Digital natives have come of age and care about journalism. Schiller said journalism school enrolment is soaring, saying these are the people who would reinvent the business model. She argued that people of her generation won’t be able to do this.

Schiller ended by quoting Clay Shirky on the opportunities before us and urged attendees to imagine and seize the future. We must be in a constant state of experimentation, she said.

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While it is important to figure out how to create and provide journalism in new ways, the real key to innovation lies in the way we think of journalism.

The challenge here isn’t a lack of new ‘innovative’ products; it is adopting what is often called a digital mindset.

This is the key to driving innovation, the focus of the latest round of the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Carnival of Journalism project.

Innovation is about understanding how networked, digital technologies and the new practices and social arrangements enabled by these have, and continue, to change the media environment.

Making this conceptual leap can be hard in journalism. Study after study has found that the way journalists think has been moulded by the norms and practice of a professional that, up until recently, has been largely unchanged.

A key part of any journalism fellowship designed to enable journalists to thrive should be provided a theoretical understanding of how the foundations of media are shifting.

Some journalists may shrug their shoulders at the idea of media studies, but it is critical that they develop an appreciation of the world of media today at a theoretical level.

It is not just about doing journalism in more “technologised” ways.

Rather it is about understanding the shift from publishing to participation, from broadcast to dialogue, from individual to collective intelligence, from sole to collaborative authorship.

At the core of this shift in mindset is approaching journalism as a practice to be shared, rather than a profession to be defended.

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Thanks to the wonderful xkcd.com

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But SEO isn’t about turning out bland headlines for Google. It is about helping readers find what they are looking it. It is about matching readers searching for specific news and information with the content on your site.

Here are five free SEO tools can help journalists make their work more findable on the web.

• SEOMoz Term Extractor: This tool analyses the content of a page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It is a useful tool to gain an overall perspective of the keywords in the text.
• Wordtracker FreeKeywords: A tool to suggest alternative keywords with a weighting to indicate their use.
• Microsoft Keyword Forecast: A tool from Microsoft adCenter Labs that aims to forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.
• Google Trends:  This Google tool analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter.
• Google Insights for Search: Another Google tool that enables you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

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In a wide-ranging discussion, Katy Culver from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and myself tackled some of the challenges and opportunities of social media.

We held it as an interactive session, with plenty of questions from the audience, expertly by Lewis Friedland from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Videos from all the sessions are available on iTunes U.

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