ONA award says STLtoday’s come a long way baby
If you’ll indulge me…
More than six years ago when I arrived at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reporters and editors were still asking why we were giving all that content away for free on the Internet. I’d get enormous push-back from colleagues in the newsroom about giving up stories for the web, steeped in fear that we’d tip off the competition (the television stations). Readers, they reasoned, wouldn’t have a reason to buy the paper.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Last night, the Online News Assocation awarded STLtoday.com two Online Journalism Awards, for breaking news and multimedia feature. I was pleased and proud to be there to accept the awards with my colleague Will Sullivan. I only hope I adequately conveyed how broad the newsroom’s contributions were to those awards. I couldn’t begin to name all the people who contributed to both awards.
The breaking news award was for our coverage of the Kirkwood City Hall shootings, where four were killed and others injured. Will noted in his remarks that an award for tragedy is hard to take. We all recognize the importance of that work to our community on such a difficult day.
Our second award was for best multimedia feature for our “Reporting for Duty” series, which documented Army recruits’ progress in basic training during a time of war. The competition in both categories was incredible. UPDATE: Here’s the link to all the winning entries for the Online Journalism Awards. And here’s a link to all the nominees. I think you’ll agree that they were all incredibly worthy.
Congrats to my colleagues in the Post-Dispatch newsroom.
We’re doomed if we can’t hire more programmers
Cover from the Las Vegas Sun history project.
If it is possible for a conference session to be inspiring, awakening and frustrating in the same moment, this one was the one: The “Las Vegas Site Redesign” session at the Online News Association conference on Friday.
After the somewhat uninspiring keynote address by magazine guru Tina Brown, I went to the Las Vegas Sun session to hear the wunderkinds of the new Rob Curley empire in the desert talk about the race to market with new site. The session, predictably, was standing room only.
It confirmed for me something I have been saying for some time in my own shop and to anyone else who would listen: The newspaper industry can’t move fast enough unless it hires more programmers/software engineers. We. Have. The. Content. But without people to help us display it, manipulate it, update it and publish it more effectively, we’re doomed. Read more
News games: Do journalists want to lose that, too?
Ian Bogost
Today was the first day for the Online News Association conference — the “pre-day,” actually, with a series of preconference programs. I attended the daylong “Playing the News” session hosted by J-Lab. The best part for me: The quote from Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
When asked why spend substantial money on building online games instead of paying for another reporter, freelance help or a web server: “I see (news gaming) as an opportunity as big as the web,” he replied. “You really want to give that up again?”
The room roared with appreciation for the candor.
I was impressed through the day with the willingness of the group to experiment and revise the work they’d done on news games — and the careful thought they gave to designing, structuring, researching and revising the games they developed. Example: Gail Robinson, editor-in-chief of the Gotham Gazette talked about a New York City budget game that roughly caricatured city officials. But the caricatures were rough so the game wouldn’t lose its shelf-live as the officials left office.
Here more of the highlights from the sessions. Read more