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Congratulations to Dan Shorter for receiving the 2008 Online Innovator Award from the Newspaper Association of America. Dan was the longtime online chief at the Palm Beach Post and recently was named Internet VP at the Star Tribune, my old stomping ground up in the Great Frozen North.

I worked with Dan at Cox Interactive and he's a great guy. Wish I could have been in Orlando to hand him the award (I was the 2007 recipient), but I couldn't go this year.

Now that Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism? Editor and Publisher quotes the announcement: "His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Getting a Knight award is cool. Having a Knight award positioned as creating little clones of yourself is doubly cool. So double congratulations are in order for Adrian Holovaty, who has received a $1.1 million Knight grant to extend/polish up/liberate his data-mashup software (as seen at ChicagoCrime.org ).

Knight is granting another $639,000 to Northwestern University for scholarships aimed at taking Web developers and training them to be journalists, effectively creating Holovaty-alikes. (Adrian actually is a Mizzou journalism grad who taught himself to be a Web developer.)

Today is a big day for foundation grants aimed at improving journalism, with the Knight News Challenge announcing its first $5 million round and the Nieman Foundation announcing 30 Harvard University fellowships.

Congratulations to all.

I want to thank the members of the organization formerly known as the NAA New Media Federation for last night honoring me with the 2007 Online Innovator Award at the NAA Marketing/Connections conference in Las Vegas. Howard Finberg presented the award and pulled quotes from emails I had written more than a decade ago, which is a little frightening considering that sometimes I'm not sure I should have said what I said the morning after, much less more than 10 years after.

Two Morris newspapers won Digital Edge awards in their size classes, the Amarillo Globe-News winning Best Use of Interactive Media for PigskkinReview.com, and the Savannah Morning News winning Most Innovative Visitor Participation for SavannahNow.com, which merges social networking, community blogging and groups into a news site.

Contratulations to the recently orphaned Star Tribune, especially my northern friend designer Jamie Hutt, for taking home awards for site design (long overdue!), shopping site and local guide (the innovative vita.mn).

The NAA New Media Federation announced last that it's no longer the New Media Federation, as "new" doesn't apply very well in a field that's well over a decade old. Henceforth it will be known as the Digital Media Federation. Good move.

E&P's Joe Strupp has a wrapup of how online components figured in the Pulitzer Prizes announced yesterday. While online elements were included in many of the winning entries, they were limited to text and still photographs -- no audio, no video, no interaction.

Strupp quoted Sig Gissler, prize administrator: "There are others to consider down the road," Gissler noted. "We will be making other change as circumstances change."

Circumstances changed last century.

Notable among the winners is opinion columnist Nick Kristof of the New York Times, who has been doing extraordinary, powerful and creative work with audio and video for several years now.

The Pulitzers are caught between worlds. In the old world, a newspaper clearly was ink on dead wood. Television could be kept at arm's length. But the new world has arrived. Perhaps it's time to focus on the journalism, not on the medium.