Advertising Age‘s Simon Dumenco expressed his distaste for the Mirror Awards and Arianna Huffington earlier this week, but we think he would have a hard time finding fault in this new journalism award.

Starting in July, the Sidney Hillman Foundation will present “The Sidney,” an award honoring socially-conscious journalism, every month. The winner, which can be a magazine, newspaper, Web site, photo essay or any broadcast outlet, will win $500 and “a bottle of union-made wine,” the foundation said. Nominations can be submitted through the foundation’s Web site.

Meanwhile, the debate about Huffington’s legitimacy as the recipient of this year’s Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award at the Mirror Awards luncheon next week continues. Yesterday, Richard Prince interviewed Lorraine Branham, dean of the Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, which presents the Mirror Awards, who stood by the school’s decision to honor Huffington.

“I spent 25 years in the newspaper business and I certainly believe journalists should be paid for their work,” Branham said, according to Prince’s online column Journal-isms. “But I am also a realist who can plainly see what is happening to the profession I know and love. It has changed and will continue to do so, and at a frightening pace…The old revenue model is in shambles and I don’t think we can lay the blame for this at the doorstep of the Huffington Post.”

Advertising Age‘s Simon Dumenco is outraged that Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications is awarding Arianna Huffington its Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award at next week’s Mirror Awards, and not just because AdAge has never won a Mirror prize. Dumenco is upset because, to him, Huffington represents all that is wrong in the world of journalism right now.

Dubbing Huffington’s Mirror Award the “Most Bitterly Ironic Media Award” in his column today, Dumenco said that the Newhouse school, which trains journalists, “should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!”

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