This year’s Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in TV Political Journalism include a new category – the Cronkite/Jackson Prize for Fact Checking Political Messages. Two winners were declared: CNN’s Tom Foreman on a national level and Denver’s KUSA-TV on the local front.

The new award is named after Brooks Jackson, the founding director of factcheck.org. It was adjudicated separately on the east coast from the rest of the 2013 prizes, which were determined by a nine-judge panel chaired by USC Annenberg School of Journalism director Geneva Overholser:

The jury was impressed by KUSA’s commitment of reportorial talent to its 44 “Truth Tests,” the skill with which it minimized the impact of the visuals in the analyzed ads and the on-air/online synergy created by posting the analyses and supporting articles and sources on 9news.com.

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Over on PBS’ Mediashift blog, USC Annenberg director Geneva Overholser opines on the new role J-schools have adopted in the current media world: test labs for new models of journalism, and, as a result of that experimentation, power players. Of course, living here in Los Angeles, we’re well aware of what the new wave of student journalism can accomplish. USC’s online paper Neon Tommy is the second largest newsroom in the city, behind only the LA Times. That said, we’ll give Overholser her say:

Perhaps the most striking change for journalism schools is the degree to which we have shifted from being learning labs whose actual journalism (if any) was limited in its distribution and impact, to being significant — even major — media players in our communities…

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