The New York Times emerged as the big winner in the Online Journalism Awards, rewarded for general excellence and for outstanding use of digital technologies. But the Online News Association awards also recognised the emergence of small start-ups that may be the shape of journalism to come. The Seattle hyperlocal site, MyBallard, took the first community collaboration award and the NYC news site Gotham Gazette took the general excellence award

The Online News Association conference session on the semantic web has been scheduled on a sunny afternoon in San Francisco. But there is still a decent turnout, demonstrating there is an interest in discovering how this idea can play a part in journalism. Paul Berry, CTO of Huffington Post defines the semantic web as the ability to pull context from any body of text and structure or categorise it –

The brains behind Google News, Krishna Bharat, braves the crowd at the Online News Association Conference. Bharat might be seen as both friend or foe, so there is a great deal of interest in what he has to say. He uses his time to explain how Google News works, crawling for news material that is arranged into story clusters. “We rank news primary based on how important editors across the

The ONA conference session on SEO is packed, reflecting the intense interesting in understanding this dark art. Jennifer Grappone, co-author of “Search Enginge Optimization an Hour a Day” provides a good grounding in how to ensure your site is visible. One factor is age – an older domain is considered by Google to be more credible. Moreover, adds Grappone, fresh news content is an advantage for news sites but a

It is no surprise that a session on entrepreneurship at the Online News Association conference is packed. Ann Grimes from the Graduate Program in Journalism, Stanford University starts by talking about a new capstone course that combines journalism, business and technology students. Her twentysomething students are interested in doing their own start-ups. Her advice to budding entrepreneurs is to fail and fail fast, learn from failure, get feedback and revise

Day two of the Online News Association kicked off with a keynote by Lisa Stone of Blogher, a network of blogs that reaches more than 15 million women a month. This is the first ONA she has been able to attend, even though she grew up wanting to work for newspapers. She describes her career path as “accidental,” where due to personal circumstances she ended up at WebTV and Women.com.

In a session on data at the Online News Association conference, Aron Pilhofer of the The New York Times, gave a detailed look at DocumentCloud. The project is intended to help present, share, find and deal with mounds of documents that investigative reporters unearth. DocumentCloud considers documents as data but attempts to put some structure around these.  The aim is to have an analytical tool to process documents and make

I’m very pleased to announce that Eric Ulken, a former editor from the Los Angeles Times, is joining the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. Eric is coming as the Canwest Visiting Professor for 2009-2010. He spent four years at the LA Times as managing news editor for latimes.com and as editor of interactive technology. He is known in online journalism circles for developing new ways of collecting, organizing and presenting

Amy Webb presented her very popular session on tech trends before an eager audience of journalists, hoping to find out what the future will bring. Webb explained how she had asked online what were the big trends for journalists. One of the main choices was mobile. But Webb said mobile was a generic term, just as you would say internet. She argued that journalists aren’t thinking of technology in a

Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Twitter, kicked off the Online News Association conference in San Francisco. The format was a fireside chat, except before an audience of hundreds of journalists, academics and developers. He starts by talking about how Twitter has taken off across the world, with major growth for Twitter in the UK, Brazil and Canada.  It is also big in Japan, so Japanese is the only other