Awards - Bay Area

The good news: The American Society of Magazine Editors is creating 12 new categories covering online media.

The bad news: Online sites are apparently still red-haired stepchildren. The awards will be handed out at a lunch in March, rather than at the swank gala in April. (Though the official ASME explanation, according to the New York Times, is a logistical one: "There's no way to present 35 awards at one event," says to ASME chief executive Sid Holt.)

Among the new categories, according to the Times: mobile media, news reporting, interactive tool, podcasting, video, and community.

The Center for Investigative Reporting-led Chauncey Bailey Project won two Online Journalism Awards this year: the $5,000 Knight Award for Public Service and the award for investigative journalism in the "small site" category.

Also notable at the awards this year: three new categories, reflecting how the practice of journalism is evolving.

August 16 is now the date to get your snail mail postmarked or your email datestamped to submit your pieces for the annual Society of Professional Journalists-Northern California Excellence in Journalism awards.

Even bloggers can play. There's a new official "Blogs" category, which honors "originality, stylish writing, timeliness, unique perspective and accuracy," with extra credit for breaking news as well as analyzing it.

But—get this—SPJ tells us bloggers can also enter the traditional categories. So if you're a blogger who breaks news, you can enter the "breaking news" category. If you do public service journalism, you can enter the "public service" category. And if you expose the nefarious malefactions of ne'er-do-wells, you can enter the "investigative reporting" category. Very cool.

The San Francisco Guardian's annual Best of the Bay issue is out. Among the winners of the Readers Poll:

BEST LOCAL WRITER
Stephen Elliot

BEST LOCAL ZINE
Hamburger Eyes

BEST LOCAL PUBLISHING HOUSE
Last Gasp

BEST LITERARY NIGHT
Writers with Drinks

BEST LOCAL BLOG
Muni Diaries

BEST LOCAL WEB SITE
Broke Ass Stuart's Goddamn Website

BEST TV NEWSCASTER
Dana King, CBS 5

BEST LOCALLY PRODUCED TV SHOW
Distortion 2 Static

BEST RADIO STATION
Energy, 92.7 FM

This is exciting: The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has added two new categories to their annual Excellence in Journalism awards: Blogs & Innovation/Entrepreneurship. SPJ says it's trying to "reflect the rapid change the profession is undergoing."

Criteria for the Blog category: "Honors originality, stylish writing, timeliness, unique perspective and accuracy. Awards will be based on a body of work that includes at least five samples, with extra value placed on the writer's ablity to break news as well as analyze it."

Criteria for the Innovation/Entrepreneurship category: "Honors organizations that have demonstrated new and innovative ways to present news and information. Entries will be judged not only on content but on how well they use the tools of the new media—such as webcasts, comments, interactivity, etc.—in their reports.

No word at present whether bloggers may enter the traditional categories like Breaking News and Public Interest.

Entries must be mailed (snail or e-) by August 7. Complete deets, including submission forms, at: norcalspj.wordpress.com/contest

The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies recently held its annual awards dinner. Among the winners were these Bay Area journos:

The Knight Challenge grants—which fund digital news experiments—were handed out at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Boston yesterday, and Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg was among the finalists who scored a total of $5.1 million in awards this year.

Rosenberg's idea, MediaBugs, which received a $335,000 grant, is to create a forum for reporting errors journalists make, in the hopes that transparency and discussion will make journalists more comfortable with reporting and fixing errors.

"All journalists make mistakes, but they sometimes view admitting errors as a mark of shame," says the project summary. "MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. MediaBugs will create a public test web site in a U.S. city for people to report errors in any news report—online or off-line. Comments will be tracked to see if they create a conversation between the reporter and the error submitter, and then show whether corrections or changes resulted."

"[T]his aggregation process will display trends in errors and show which news organizations are responsive to public questions and comments," the summary concludes.

Berkeley-based Rosenberg, who writes the Wordyard blog, co-founded Salon in 1995 and worked there as a writer, editor, and managing editor. He's the author of two books: Dreaming in Code and Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Other Knight Challenge Grant winners this year involve crowdsourcing, mobile technology, and digital investigative journalism. For more, see Knight's list of the 2009 projects.

On his blog, Rosenberg writes he'll be starting the pilot project in the Bay Area later this year. So all you Bay Area journos, get ready. It's about to become a lot more transparent around here.

More about how MediaBugs will work, after the jump.

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Where else are you going to get reps from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sidling up to Victoria's Secret models sidling up next to Star Wars action figure collectors? We can only think of one place: The Webby Awards gala.

Hosted in New York last night, videos from the glam shindig are now available on a bang-up YouTube site, so you can fritter away your lunch break watching all those five-word acceptance speechs, including from celebs like Sarah Silverman, Trent Reznor, Jimmy Fallon, Molly Sims, and, of course, the hot Victoria's Secret models.

Side note: When BayNewser first watched the VS models' acceptance speech, we thought they said (through heavy accents): "Victoria's Secret, sexy lunch break." Which we thought was pretty original. But when they added a "yeah" on the end, we realized there were too many words. Using complicated voice decoding software, we eventually determined that they'd just said, "Victoria's Secret, sexy lingerie, yeah." So disappointing. But, the attendees probably didn't mind—I mean, how many were actually listening to chicas in the first place?

Bay Areans honored include: Wired, Mission Local, Qik, Lonely Planet Publications, the George Lucas Educational Fund, and, of course, Twitter.

Oh, and the Star Wars action figure collectors' site? That's here. Pretty cool, no?

The list of all winners and nominees is here.

KQED and KTEH recently won a slew of awards.

Wired's GeekDad has drafted a list of the top 100 geeks to follow on Twitter.

Local journos and authors on the list are:

#10 - Patrick Norton (@patricknorton)
Host of Tekzilla at online television network Revision3 and former host of TechTv's The Screen Savers

#57 Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki)
Columnist for Entrepreneur and author of several books including The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries.

#61 Sarah Lane(@sarahlane)
Produces the Tech channel at Current TV and contributor to the Web-centric podcast net@night

#63 Leo Laporte (@LeoLaporte)
Tech journalist and creator and producer of TWiT.tv podcasts

#69 Lore Sjoberg (@loresjoberg)
Writer for Wired.com

#71 Scott Beale (@laughingsquid)
Publisher and editor of Laughing Squid

#95 Annalee Newitz (@annaleen)
Freelance journalist, editor of science fiction and science blog io9 (part of the Gawker Media network), and co-editor of She's Such a Geek