Former Huffington Post contributor Rachel Sklar nabbed two People’s Choice awards following online voting for Mirror Award nominees.

2009 marks the third year that Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications has presented its Mirror Awards, which honor media reporters. The finalists were first announced last month and members of the public and fellow journalists were asked to view each finalist’s work online and vote for a People’s Choice winner. The six winners of the online balloting were revealed today.

Sklar, who is current working for Abrams Research and The Daily Beast, won People’s Choice prizes for best commentary in digital media and best single article in digital media for her piece “The NYT‘s Selective, Misleading Pentagon Story.”

Other winners included Fast Company‘s Clive Thompson for best single article in traditional media, Mark Bowden of The Atlantic for best profile in traditional media and Broadcasting & Cable‘s Ben Grossman for best commentary in traditional media.

The real Mirror Award winners, selected by a jury of journalists and journalism educators, will be announced at a luncheon on June 9. Sklar’s former boss, Arianna Huffington, is also being honored with the Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Obama for America New Media Department/Blue State Digital will be receiving the i-3 award for impact, innovation and influence.

A full release about the People’s Choice winners after the jump

Earlier: Mirror, Mirror: Big Fish Dominate Media Beat Awards

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Bill Keller is not such a fan of Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair write-around profile on Arthur Sulzberger Jr. His letter in full below (via Romenesko):

To the Editor
Vanity Fair

If you strip away the bombast, the recycled anecdotes and the mistakes an elementary fact-checking should have caught (“1300 reporters” is off by about 800), you are left with Mark Bowden’s attempt at an original thesis. His thesis is this: Arthur Sulzberger believes that “journalism pays.” He actually believes that its value is not only civic, but commercial. Ho, ho. How naive of him. Journalism doesn’t pay.

*Update* Mark Bowden responds in the comments section.

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According to a report from Gartner Inc., newspapers need to do much, much more to engage the social side of their readers if they hope to compete in the increasingly difficult marketplace.

Specifically, newspaper Web sites fail to integrate social media tools effectively. As a result, while 49 percent of those surveyed use search engines to find news or content every week (and that number seems low), only 20 percent use search tools that exist on newspaper and magazine sites.

This trend mimics one discussed in Mark Bowden‘s Vanity Fair article about The New York Times that made the round yesterday. In it, the author discusses how one of the revolutions of the Web — one that newspapers failed to capitalize upon — is that news has become deaggregated.

Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news.

These latest numbers from Gartner would suggest newspapers still aren’t learning any lessons.