Congratulations to all the winners and finalists in the Online Journalism Awards. The General Excellence Awards went to BBC News, The Globe and Mail, Voice of San Diego, NJ Spotlight, OWNI and La Nacion in their  respective categories. 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 –

Major US news organisations dominated the Online Journalism Awards. MSNBC.com took the award for General Excellence in Online Journalism, while CNN.com’s Haiti Earthquake coverage won for breaking news. NPR was recognised for its innovative approach, taking the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism for its API and for Outstanding Use of Emerging Platforms for its mobile applications. Here’s the full list of winners recognised at the Online

Just a few weeks ago, the Spanish Soitu.es news site was praised for its “where core ideas come through as confident innovation and mesh with traditional journalism to create a fresh and distinctive package”. The words came from the judges at the Online News Association awards, where Soitu.es was, for a second year running, as an example of excellence in online journalism. But the pioneering news site is closing down.

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