Category Archives: Journalism

Edward R. Murrow Awards

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Warning: Self-serving shop talk follows. The Radio-Television News Directors Association announced the winners in their annual Edward R. Murrow Awards competition today. This is kind of a big deal in the radio and TV news business. This year they started out with 3,182 entries and gave 74 awards to 53 news organization. The regional winners were announced a few weeks ago and today they announced the national winners. And one of our network websites won.

Entries fall into one of three categories (Network/Syndication Service, Large Market and Small Market) for radio and the same three for TV. And this year they added a category called Websiste Non-Broadcast.

Our entry (Missourinet.com) won in the Radio Network/Syndication Service category. Pretty cool given that the competition was ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN and god only knows who else. You gotta figure there’s some “online journalists” in NY and Atlanta scratching their heads and asking each other, “What the hell is a Missourinet? Somebody get a map!”

For some reason the RTNDA website provide the urls of the Website winners but didn’t create links. That seems a little clueless to me.

*Radio Network/Syndication Service: Missourinet, Jefferson City, MO
*Television Network/Syndication Service: MSNBC

*Television Large-Market: News 14 Carolina, Charlotte, NC
*Television Small-Market: Capital News 9, Albany, NY
*Radio Large-Market: KSL-AM, Salt Lake City
*Radio Small-Market: WBLL-AM, Bellefontaine, OH
*Website Non-Broadcast: Washington Post, Washington; Belo Interactive, Dallas

I’ll probably never know what they judges liked about our site. And let’s face it, those big national network websites have some cool features our site does not. But I can name a few things we’ve got that are unique or cool or both:

Crash Reports: Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports, updated 24/7.
Legislature.com: Live debate audio from the state legislature. Then we archive. We’ve got it back to 2002.

Supreme Court Arguments: Oral agurments (live & archived). I think we have nearly 500 arguments online.
Missouri Death Row: Ours has become the “official” site for Missouri.

Last time I checked, there were no other websites featuring this content. On the planet. At least not the way we do. Of course, there’s a lot we can do to improve our site but, for now, it’s nice to know someone appreciates the effort. The big award show is October 4th in NY. Gomer Goes to Manhatten in a Rented Tux.

Time.com on blogs

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“…blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence.”

Dan Gillmor on rolling his own news

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“I realized I was probably getting a better report than anyone watching television in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news. It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest component was my own tinkering to create my own news “product” — a compilation of the best material I could find. It was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do next year and in future races, but it worked.”

Google’s new News Alerts.

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Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”