The Online News Association’s 2007 conference closed with its awards ceremony, where USAToday took general excellence overall — the judges citing how the paper had moved to put its audience at “the centre of news, not just at the receiving end”.
The pattern running through the rest of the twenty categories was the more interesting one: blogs won a large share of them. Slate’s William Saletan took online commentary in the large category and NewWest.net’s Wild Bill in the small; ABC’s The Blotter won investigative journalism; Wired.com’s Defense blog won beat reporting in the large category, and Florida Today’s Space Beat in the small.
The argument drawn from that list at the time was that it ought to settle the question then running through the trade over whether blogging had any place in journalism. The entries were judged on the work rather than the publishing format, and the categories the blogs won — investigative reporting and beat coverage among them — were not the ones a critic could dismiss as opinion writing.