awards

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?

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 ).

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.

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.