Thank you for making the 2009 ONA Annual Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet such a success. We’ve received positive feedback about this year’s event, but we know there is room for improvement.

Recently, we e-mailed attendees a survey to complete. It’s a bit long, we admit, but there is a lot of ground to cover and feedback is vital to the continued success of the conference and the organization.

Each person who completes the survey by answering every question will be entered in a drawing to win a new iPod nano.

If you attended the conference but did not receive a survey, please request one at ONA09@journalists.org.

The survey — and the chance to win the nano — will close Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 11:59 PT. Winners will be selected and notified on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

ONA iPod Nano Drawing

Official Rules

1. Eligibility: The ONA09 Sweepstakes (the “Sweepstakes”) is open only to legal residents of the United States (including D.C.), Canada (excluding Quebec) and the United Kingdom who are at least eighteen (18) years old at the time of entry. Current and former directors and employees of Online News Association (“Sponsor”), as well as the immediate family (spouse, parents, siblings and children) and household members of each such director and employee, are not eligible. The Sweepstakes is subject to all applicable laws and regulations. Void in Quebec and where prohibited. Participation constitutes full and unconditional agreement to these Official Rules and Sponsor’s decisions, which are final and binding in all matters related to the Sweepstakes.

2. Sponsor: Online News Association, P.O. Box 65741, Washington, DC 20035, U.S.A.

3. Timing: The Sweepstakes begins on Oct. 12, 2009 and ends on Oct. 21, 2009, at 11:59 p.m. PT (the “Promotion Period”). Sponsor’s computer is the official time-keeping device for the Sweepstakes.

4. How to Enter: During the Promotion Period, complete the ONA09 evaluation survey for automatic entry. Alternatively, hand-print your full name, mailing address, email address and telephone number on a postcard and mail it to Online News Association, P.O. Box 65741, Washington, DC 20035, U.S.A. Each postcard entry must be separately stamped. All mail-in entries must be postmarked by Oct. 21, 2009, and received by Oct. 26, 2009. Sponsor is not responsible for late, lost, mutilated, illegible or postage-due entries and all such entries will be disqualified. Multiple entrants are not permitted to share the same email address. Use of any automated system to participate is prohibited and will result in disqualification

5. Winner Selection: Sponsor will randomly select one (1) Grand Prize Winner from among all eligible email and mail-in entries received during the Promotion Period. The Grand Prize drawing will take place on Oct. 28, 2009, between 9 and 9:30 a.m. ET. Participants need not be present to win. The Grand Prize Winner will be notified by email and will receive the Grand Prize by mail. If the Grand Prize Winner is a Canadian resident, as a condition of receiving the Grand Prize, he or she will be required to first correctly answer a time-limited mathematical skill-testing question without any assistance. In the event that the Grand Prize Winner is disqualified for any reason, Sponsor will award the Grand Prize to an alternate winner selected by random drawing from among all remaining eligible entries received.

6. Grand Prize: ONE (1) GRAND PRIZES: One (1) Grand Prize will be awarded in this Sweepstakes consisting of one 16GB iPod Nano. Actual Retail Value: $179.00. (Prize value is stated in U.S. Dollars). The odds of winning the prize depend on the number of eligible entries received. No cash or other substitutions by winner are allowed. All prizes are subject to availability and Sponsor reserves the right to substitute the prize with a prize or component of equal or greater retail value. No more than the stated number of prizes will be awarded. In the event that production, technical, seeding, programming or any other reasons cause more than the stated number of prizes as set forth in these Official Rules to be available and/or claimed, Sponsor reserves the right to award only the stated number of prizes by a random drawing among all legitimate prize claims.

7. Release: By acceptance of a prize, the Grand Prize Winner agrees to release and hold harmless Sponsor, its advertising/promotion agencies, and prize supplier, and each of their respective officers, directors, employees and agents (collectively, the “Released Parties”) from and against any claim or cause of action, including, but not limited to, personal injury, death, or damage to or loss of property, arising out of participation in the Sweepstakes or the receipt or use or misuse of any prize.

8. Publicity: Except where prohibited, participation in the Sweepstakes constitutes the Grand Prize Winner’s consent to Sponsor’s and its agents’ use of winner’s name, likeness, photograph, voice, opinions and/or hometown or promotional purposes in any media, worldwide, without further payment or consideration.

9. General Conditions: Sponsor reserves the right to cancel, suspend and/or modify the Sweepstakes, or any part of it, if any fraud, technical failures or any other factor beyond Sponsor’s reasonable control impairs the integrity or proper functioning of the Sweepstakes, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Sponsor reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify any individual it finds to be tampering with the entry process or the operation of the Sweepstakes or to be acting in violation of these Official Rules or any other promotion or in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner. Sponsor’s failure to enforce any term of these Official Rules shall not constitute a waiver of that provision.

10. Governing Law: All issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Official Rules, or the rights and obligations of the participants and Sponsor in connection with the Sweepstakes, shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of California without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules (whether of California or any other jurisdiction), which would cause the application of the laws of any jurisdiction other than California.

11. Winner List: For the name and hometown of the Grand Prize Winner, send your request and a self-addressed stamped envelope to Online News Association, P.O. Box 65741, Washington, DC 20035, U.S.A.

The buzz word at ONA09 was entrepreneurship. Twitter CEO Evan Williams encouraged it. Tech Guy Leo Laporte said he believed it was the future. Several sessions discussed how to transition from the “journalist” role to the “entrepreneur” role.

The Student Newsroom sought out entrepreneurs at the conference, ranging from a Knight News Challenge winner to journalists diving into data visualization.

Muckety

At first glance, Muckety maps look like flow charts. But hover over a line that connects a name to a company and a window will pop up, saying that this man serves as the company chairman.

Relationships are what the Internet startup is about, according to company co-founders John Decker and Laurie Bennett. Muckety takes data and creates a visualization of how the data is connected.

The staff analyzes different news stories on an issue and then sorts through the data in them. Currently, the service is free and people can suggest stories to the staff.

“When I look at maps with certain stories–let’s say the (Bernie) Madoff scam–an interactive map showing the relationships is so helpful to the user that you almost think, ‘How can you run a story without it?’ ” said Bennett, who works in Muckety’s New York office.

The idea for the company was born while Deck and Bennett were working for ePodunk, a startup that focuses on community profiles. Both were veteran journalists, having previously worked for the Detroit Free Press. After seeing art that illustrated relationships, the two decided to apply that same technique to data.

The company launched in 2006 and has since been recognized by news organizations, including The New York Times and Economist.com.

Eventually, Muckety aims to license the technology so third parties can either give Muckety data to visually analyze or license the server technology to others.

CityCircles

At first, it was just a class. Then it was a proposal. Now it’s a launch.

For Aleksandra Chojnacka and Adam Klawonn, the last year flew by. They met during a digital media class at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. After coming up with a concept for a hyperlocal news map that would focus on Phoenix’s new light rail system, the pair entered the Knight News Challenge and won a $95,000 grant for a project called The Daily Phoenix.

Chojnacka and Klawonn’s project, now called CityCircles, will premiere in Phoenix next week. City Circles will be a multimedia platform that will host information and stories about the communities connected by Phoenix’s new light rail system, which opened in December 2008. The main platform is a Google map of the system. Users can click on the different stops to learn about news, social networking and events in those areas.

“We saw that there was a lack of local information,” Chojnacka said. “There might be information on the Web, but none of it was organized.”

After the launch, Chojnacka expects different features of CityCircles to premier every month.

News Desk

Josh Wilson believes that decentralized is the way to go.

After working in various kinds of media, from SFGate.com to community radio, he was inspired by how artistic communities came together to provide information in a decentralized system. He believed that different sources could be created to provide local news for different communities.

With that, the idea for News Desk was born.

Currently, News Desk is best known for “News You Might Have Missed,” which centers around the idea that the site will write stories about news the mainstream media didn’t cover.

Wilson said he hopes the site will grow to cover different topics and regions.

“It could be Duluth.NewsDesk.org or Reno.NewsDesk.org,” Wilson said. “It could be Immigration.NewsDesk.org.”

NewsDesk recently won a $25,000 grant from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation to continue to build its foundation.

Jessica Estepa is a senior journalism major at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is a member of the ONA09 student newsroom.

Publish2, a two-year old startup of collaborative journalism tools, won $5,000 and the first Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism at the 10th annual awards ceremony. My Ballard, a hyperlocal site covering Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, won the first Community Collaboration award, while the Gotham Gazette was recognized for General Excellence, Micro Site, a new subcategory.

All three awards were introduced by the Online Journalism Awards committee this year to acknowledge the important role of emerging technology, the influence of the independent digital journalist and the growth of community reporting efforts.

“These honorees demonstrate the vitality and innovation of online journalists in a time of tumult and transformation in our industry,” said OJA Committee Co-Chair Anthony Moor, Deputy Manging Editor/Interactive of The Dallas Morning News. “We continue to be impressed by the way journalists are pushing the envelope and serving the public interest at the same time.”

ProPublica, LasVegasSun.com and The New York Times also won General Excellence Awards, which include a $3,000 cash prize, also courtesy of the Gannett Foundation.

The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors that investigated the death of the Oakland Post editor, won the Knight Award for Public Service and a $5,000 cash prize from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Launched in May 2000, the OJAs are administered by the Online News Association, in partnership with the University of Miami’s School of Communication.

Following are the winners, by category, with judges’ comments and links to the entries.

Knight Award for Public Service
The Chauncey Bailey Project
This entry required work within the community and led directly to the indictment of two men, an investigation of the Oakland Police Department and the resignation of the Chief of Police. The reporting is good and relentless under what were obviously and literally dangerous circumstances. The reporters didn’t shy away from exposing both criminals and police. The Chauncey Bailey Project is absolutely exemplary — a type of investigation that we wish more organizations could pursue. Its role is necessary, the reporting great.

Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
Publish2
Publish2’s mission and unique tools encourage the spirit of open information and effectively fosters collaboration between teams of journalists and readers. Its link publishing widgets and easy-to-use in-browser tools are designed to fit cohesively into time-pressed journalists’ work days.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Micro Site
Gotham Gazette
The site is exemplary in its thoroughness, comprehensiveness and the depth with which it explored the issues that are important to New Yorkers and New York. The quality of the games is impressive, as is the depth of interactive features it offers. Overall, it was a top-notch example of the trend toward hyperlocal coverage.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small Site
ProPublica
Here is a vision of what journalism can be as private enterprise fails to support it. ProPublica presents outstanding investigative work integrating original reporting with citizen journalism, graphic explanations and interactive tools. ProPublica helps other journalists do better work, too, by providing ideas, stories, data and tools. Very rich site, dense with information and a million ways to get into a story, from sortable databases to blogs, stories, graphics and photos. The inventive ways they parse and discover information using scraping, databasing and other web tools are great.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Medium Site
LasVegasSun.com
One word kept springing to mind and that was meticulous. You click into the site and you see many things worthy of wonder. The home page changes all the time. They can do fairly sophisticated things with these stories. The details are good: related story links that are actually related. You sometimes slide your mouse of a photo and it becomes alive. They’ve done some amazing projects. They have loyal commentors. Their mobile site is remarkable as well.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Large Site
nytimes.com, The New York Times
The New York Times stands above others. What I like about the way they use technology is that they are really thinking about their readers. The content is superb. The elegance of their photo editing stands out. In the digital area they are more innovative than others. IN terms of execution, in terms of content, in terns of just about everything you can think about, these guys hit it. When I consider general excellence I consider every department on that site. There’s no question about it to me, the New York Times comes out on top.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Small Site
Radio Azattyq, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kazakh Service (Kazakhstan)
Good original journalism and tenacity of purpose marked out RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service as worthy winners of the non-English small site award.Both were in evidence when Kazazh authorities tried to ban a book critical of the President, threatening to punish anyone who even touched it.Radio Azattyq’s local site stood in defense of citizens’ rights to seek and receive information, and eventually forced the authorities to back down.

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Large Site
SOITU.ES (Spain)
This Spanish site clinched the small site award last year, its first year of operation, and it continues to go from strength to strength.An underlying philosophy of sharing, linking and audience-focused engagement runs through its mix of original content and aggregated news and features material. Giveaway widgets, the ambitious flashinfo news panel and the elselector crowd-aided aggregation tool all get front-page billing.But the site is more than just these elements. It’s a work-in-progress, where core ideas come through as confident innovation and mesh with traditional journalism to create a fresh and distinctive package.

Breaking News, Small Site
Pressconnects.com/Press & Sun-Bulletin, Massacre on Front Street
This was clearly a huge story and they pounced on it. The interactive graphics showed what happened where and when. They did this very important story justice — as thorough as you could expect under the circumstances.

Breaking News, Medium Site
Knoxnews.com, Church Shooting
What Knoxnews.com put together in its first day of coverage of a church shooting was thorough breaking-news coverage at its best. The Web site’s reporting teams get online coverage. They merged text reporting with extensive video interviews of key individuals, the son of a victim and the neighbor of the suspected killer, among others.

Breaking News, Large Site
BBC News, Mumbai Attacks
A breaking news blog should be a one-stop shop and this was it. It quotes a lot of primary source information; there are comments in the hundreds on every single post. An unassuming-looking but engaging blog that covers many different things and covers it well.

Specialty Site Journalism, Small Site
Yale Environment 360
Such a well-done site. It has this great design and high-quality contributors. When you read the comments, you know the incredibly knowledgeable audience is totally engaged with the site. It’s a nice place to be and learn. Yale 360 does multiple things in parallel. It is news; it is opinion; it is community engagement. It is taking debate to a higher level and this is so needed in the journalism community now.

Specialty Site Journalism, Large Site
Military Times, Army Times Publishing Company
This site is cleanly designed and easy to navigate. It has a unique challenge in that it does serve a community, but not one with a geographic centre — the type of challenge for which the Internet is perfect. This is a virtual meeting place for people in the military, where they can catch up on news of professional and personal interest, exchange stories and advice, and honor their colleagues and their service. The special sites noted are quite well done, easy to navigate and full of specialized information that makes the overall site of even greater value to the reader.

Investigative Journalism, Small Site
The Chauncey Bailey Project
A tenacious and precise investigation of an institutional scandal that focuses on the murder of a journalist but explains much more about the community that created the conditions for his death. An exceptionally written and presented package. Strong photojournalism and timeline storytelling techniques. Outstanding ongoing effort two years hence.

Investigative Journalism, Large Site
Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield, McClatchy, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law
Some real “gets” here with dramatic on the record stuff that we now know is true. It shows you the main characters, gives you some sense of the chronology and lets the reader see how they came to the conclusion they did. A fairly rich project and a hell of a job. One cannot write this story too much.

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Small Site
National Film Board of Canada, Waterlife
Gorgeous. Crazy good. Stunning. User experience is unlike anything we’ve seen. They threw in, in an organized way, the kitchen sink on this project and succeeded in presenting an innovative and informative look at the issue of water. There is multi-dimensional, multiple media story-telling going on here. Heads and tails above the rest.

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Medium Site
LasVegasSun.com, Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst
There’s an awesome coordination between map points, graphics and video. That’s innovation. They built a heat map of residential water use that’s remarkable. Las Vegas put it all together.

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Large Site
Washington Post Digital, Sacred Ground: The Building of the Pentagon Memorial
Once you start exploring, it’s a great piece. It has depth because it lets you explore not only the site, but how it was planned, how it was built via interviews with the architects and a 3D walkthrough. It works very well at different levels. Excellent use of the technologies and the tools.

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Small Site
The Flame Trench, Florida Today’s Space Team Blog
These guys won for their space coverage last year — and it’s quite a bit better since then. They’ve added a blog along with live video and text coverage of events. And the site organizes, covers, filters it and links to the blog in a way that makes it meaningful.

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Large Site
NPR.org, Planet Money
Planet Money provided a distinct value to a community of readers at a time when clear reporting on the financial crisis was just vital. A lot of people were looking for and needed this information. The inaugural post that kicked off Planet Money was a feat of explanatory reporting. It stood out in an excellent field by the value it provided.

Online Commentary/Blogging, Small Site
No Award

Online Commentary/Blogging, Medium Site
Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast
May have written the most important blog entry of 2008: “Sorry Dad, I’m voting for Obama.” One of the key moments of the U.S. Presidential campaign. This walked the fine line between commentary and traditional blogging. Terrific writing. There was a use on occasion of photos, links to video — adding another level. But the writing is what puts some of what he’s doing in a different category. He is bringing great writing “chops” to this format and figuring out how to write for it.

Online Commentary/Blogging, Large Site
Hero Complex, Los Angeles Times
Elegantly executed. It’s an extremely well-rounded perspective on pretty much everything covered, taking a mass popular culture subject and going very deeply into the subject. The blog helps you discover things.

Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies, Small Site
Muckety
This is impressive from a technical standpoint.. Even if I can understand how these diagrams were built, it impresses me that they can be manipulated, expanded, contracted, saved, centered, trimmed, etc. at this level. Wow. Not only does this site’s technology produce cutting-edge and relevant journalism, but it allows you to do the same.

Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies, Large Site
The New York Times, Interactive Graphics
Super groundbreaking. Head and shoulders above the rest. Election widgets everywhere were good last year. The New York Times’ was extra good. The Olympics graphics really brought me into it. I am not a sports fan but I watched it over and over again. There’s nothing that compares to it.

Online Video Journalism, Small Site
Danny Wilcox Frazier, Produced by MediaStorm, Driftless: Stories from Iowa
This is a stark, black-and-white tale of an Iowa family of farmers. It feels extremely original, the camera work seems expert and the interviews will break your heart while never lingering on any one expression or sentiment. There’s a richness, restraint and even a little dark humor here that was nowhere in any of the other videos.

Online Video Journalism, Large Site
Slate V, The Power Recap
Very funny expression of presidential campaign highlights, built entirely on selection of key moments in stills and video and then blending them in a frenetic editing style that works to create the “viral video” formula. It is an interesting commentary experiment offering the kind of analysis that cannot ordinarily be found in straight journalistic reporting by newspapers.

Community Collaboration
Next Door Media, My Ballard
My Ballard is exactly what newspapers are trying to do with hyperlocal content. And these guys do it. There was no site that fulfills the sense of community collaboration better. It’s the literal definition of the category. It’s extremely useful for the neighborhood and because it lists cool places to go, it works for others.

Student Journalism, Small Team
Lisa Pickoff-White, University of California, Berkeley, It Happens at Midnight
Creative; and had a lot of stuff going on. It’s fun it’s entertaining, it’s creative.The design, tools and interactivity are even better than the basic report told, so that elevates it as a fine example of how to tell an online story in multiple components.

Student Journalism, Large Team
UNC-Chapel Hill, Andaman Rising
Beautiful job with photographic storytelling. A very nice project that many a professional organization would be proud to have on their site.

The judges of this year’s awards were:

Rich Beckman, Knight Chair of Visual Journalism, School of Communication, University of Miami
Alberto Cairo, James H. Shumaker Assistant Professor, School of Journalism, UNC-Chapel Hill
Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor, ProPublica
Rich Jaroslovsky, Technology/Digital Media Columnist, Bloomberg News
Keith W. Jenkins, Supervising Senior Producer for Multimedia, NPR.org
Tom Kennedy, Multimedia Journalism Consultant
Solana Larsen, Managing Editor, Global Voices
Suzanne Levinson, Director of Site Operations, Miami Herald Media Co.
Michelle Nicolosi, Executive Producer, seattlepi.com
Tenny Tatusian, Associate Editor, latimes.com
Matt Thompson, Interim Online Community Manager, Knight Foundation
Molly Wood, Executive Editor, CNETTV.com

Judges of the non-English awards were:

Rosental Alves, Professor and Knight Chair in Journalism, University of Texas
Paul Brannan, Editor, Emerging Platforms, BBC News
Katie King, Creative and Development Editor, MSN UK
Eric Scherer, Director of Strategic Planning, Agence-France Presse

Judges of the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism were:
Bob Greiner, Manager, Editorial Tools and Projects, washingtonpost.com
Steve Outing, Digital Media Consultant; Columnist, Editor & Publisher
Margaret Rosas, Founder and Chief Strategist, Quiddities Dev, Inc.
Danny Sanchez, Digital Platform Manager, Hartford Courant/Fox61.

Judges were recused from discussing categories in which their own organization or organizations they are associated with were entered.

During day two of Confession Sessions, we asked ONA attendees to share why they got into this business and to look ahead to future of journalism.

Liz Lufkin, co-chair of the 2009 ONA Conference, reveals the moment she knew she wanted to become a journalist. from Online News Association on Vimeo.

Watch all of the Confession Sessions from the conference:

Want to chime in? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Kate Kilpatrick is a student at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

As part of the 2009 Online News Association Conference, the student newsroom conducted a live poll. Using Poll Everywhere, over two days, we asked people to text or tweet their response to the question: What will save journalism? The responses were updated in real time and appeared on the conference site for the duration. This is a word cloud of the responses.

Online Journalism Award (OJA) winners this year won’t soon be forgotten. In between an exhibit of Pulitzer prize-winning photography and drawers of newspapers dating back to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, many of 2009’s innovators and their projects will be welcomed into the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. The museum is archiving the winners as part of a new effort to preserve history in an era that is not naturally wired for nostalgia.

“The phrase has always been that journalism is the first draft of history,” said Thom Lieb, a professor of mass communication at Maryland’s Towson University. “Unfortunately, in the digital age, those drafts are disappearing.”

The 2009 OJA winners (full list) have a lot in common with their ancestors at the Newseum, said Lieb, who was instrumental in connecting the museum with ONA. Both the winners and their predecessors focused on local interests and independent journalism.

For example, Publish 2, which offers journalists a set of linking tools that foster collaboration between journalists and readers, received $5,000 as the first Gannett Foundation Award winner for technical innovation in the service of digital journalism. The Gotham Gazette, a civic-minded resource for New York City, awarded a Creative Use Award in 2004 by OJA, was this year recognized again for its general excellence in the micro site category. Next Door Media’s My Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood site, was recognized as the first to receive a Community Collaboration Award.

“For all the neighborhood newsites, I think this is a respected stamp of approval for all the sites,” said Cory Bergman who accepted the award with Kate, his wife and co-founder of Next Door Media.

Among the other award-winners was The Chauncey Bailey Project, an in-depth investigation by more than 24 journalists into the murder of an Oakland Post reporter. The project took home two awards, receiving $5,000 for the Knight Award for Public Service and OJA’s award for investigative journalism in the small site category. Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, by McClatchy journalists Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield, was honored by ONA for investigative journalism for a large site. ProPublica, the LasVegasSun.com, and The New York Times were also honored, each receiving a $3,000 cash prize from the Gannett Foundation for general excellence.

Overseas winners included Kazakhstan’s Radio Azattyq, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kazakh Service for the small-site category for standing in defense of citizen’s rights to seek and receive information when Kazakh authorities tried to ban a book critical of the president. Spain’s soitu.es won an OJA large site award for its focus on audience-focused engagement and its mix of original content and aggregated material.

For Breaking News, OJA awarded top honors to Pressconnects.com/Press & Sun-Bulletin for its coverage of a mass shooting, the BBC News for its coverage of the Mumbai Attacks, and Knoxnews.com for its coverage of a church shooting.

In the Specialty Site Journalism category, Yale Environment 360 was recognized for its melting pot of news, opinion and community engagement. The Military Times was recognized for its service to a community that lacks a geographic center.

The OJA Awards for Multimedia Feature Presentation went to the National Film Board of Canada for Waterlife, the LasVegasSun.com for Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst, and Washington Post Digital for Sacred Ground: The Building of the Pentagon Memorial.

The ONA Awards for Topical Reporting/Blogging went to The Flame Trench, Florida Today’s Space Team Blog and NPR.org’s Planet Money. The ONA Awards for Online Commentary/Blogging went to Christopher Buckley of The Daily Beast and Hero Complex by the Los Angeles Times.

Muckety and The New York Times Interactive Graphics won for Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies. In the student journalism category, awards were given to Lisa Pickoff-White, a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley for her project, It Happens at Midnight, and to students at UNC-Chapel Hill for Andaman Rising. A special recognition was given to Doug Feaver of washingtonpost.com, who received the Rich Jaroslovsky Award for lifetime service to ONA.

For Online Video Journalism, ONA gave awards to MediaStorm’s Danny Wilcox Frazier for Driftless: Stories from Iowa and Slate V for The Power Recap.

In the next year Lieb will begin the daunting task of hunting down award winners from the last 10 years, knowing that some projects, and their creators, might be impossible to find again. The BBC’s 24-Hours of War, a video project about wars throughout the world, for example, has a site, but the videos themselves are gone, says Lieb.

“It’s a project I’d love my students to see but it’s no longer available,” he said. “Someone leaves the OJA awards doing cartwheels and then they move on.”

This year, however, will be different. After the ceremony, Lieb interviewed the winners from Muckety, soitu.es, The Chauncey Bailey Project, Pressconnect.com, BBC News, NPR and MyBallard for the Newseum exhibit.

Judges of 2009’s Online Journalism Awards

• Rosental Alves, Professor and Knight Chair in Journalism, University of Texas
• Rich Beckman, Knight Chair of Visual Journalism, School of Communication, University of Miami
• Paul Brannan, Editor, Emerging Platforms, BBC News
• Alberto Cairo, James H. Shumaker Assistant Professor, School of Journalism, UNC-Chapel Hill
• Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor, ProPublica
• Rich Jaroslovsky, Technology/Digital Media Columnist, Bloomberg News
• Keith W. Jenkins, Supervising Senior Producer for Multimedia, NPR.org
• Tom Kennedy, Multimedia Journalism Consultant
• Katie King, Creative and Development Editor, MSN UK
• Solana Larsen, Managing Editor, Global Voices
• Suzanne Levinson, Director of Site Operations, Miami Herald Media Co.
• Michelle Nicolosi, Executive Producer, seattlepi.com
• Eric Scherer, Director of Strategic Planning, Agence-France Presse
• Tenny Tatusian, Associate Editor, latimes.com
• Matt Thompson, Interim Online Community Manager, Knight Foundation
• Molly Wood, Executive Editor, CNETTV.com

The click-through slideshow was photographed by Armand Emamdjomeh and Nicole Fallek and photo edited by Isabel Esterman.

This multimedia presentation on mobile technology was created using VuVox and includes video excerpts with David LaFontaine. LaFontaine delivered a presentation at the 2009 ONA Conference titled “Creating Content with Your Phone.”

Lauren Gentile is a sophomore at American University and Abby Selden is a senior at Belmont University. They were reporting on the conference with the 2009 ONA student newsroom.

Ryan Sholin, Publish 2 from Online News Association on Vimeo.

Abandoning the typical lecture format, Ryan Sholin and Scott Karp prompted a conversation among approximately 40 journalists at one of two “Unconference” sessions Saturday at ONA09.

Sholin and Karp’s presentation was titled “Context and the Coming Link Economy, Why We Link, What We Get, What Comes Next.”

Links serve as “the compilation of what we all know,” said Matt Thompson, an online journalist who blogs at Snarkmarket and Newsless.org.

In the early days of the commercial Internet, news sites were hesitant to use links in articles. Now, however, Sholin and Karp say links are used to manage the vast amounts of information written on any topic. Reporters are expected to use editorial judgment to aggregate and curate what’s important on the Web.

The philosophy is to “send people away so they keep coming back for more,” a line Sholin credits to blogger Dave Winer on his Twitterfeed.

Sholin and Karp run Publish2, a website that enables journalists to aggregate links and collaborate with others online. The site incorporates collaboration tools such as newsgroups, which are aggregations of links from multiple media sources grouped by regions or themes.

Even with breaking news, Thompson said, links serve as backgrounders, explainers, how-tos and as an answer to the question “What is our assembled knowledge of what is happening at this point?”

The end result, Sholin said, is “a much more powerful work of journalism” than could be produced individually.

Thompson brought up the example of a website he created last year called The Money Meltdown, which was simply an aggregation of links summarizing coverage by media about the economic crisis. The site received 20,000 hits in two days.

Sholin compared it to why people follow the people they do on Twitter.

“If people keep sending you interesting things, you’re going to keep coming back.”

Kat Powers, another conference participant, asked what to say when bloggers who want to provide alternatives to mainstream media object to their content being linked to on major media websites.

Karp had one suggestion.

“Go print it on paper. You’re in the wrong medium.”