The Online News Association announced their 2011 winners this weekend, and while it's an illustrious list, it's also a very predicatble--and corporate--one. Why do I say that? No hyperlocal sites that don't write in NYTimes style won anything-and only two hyperlocal sites won at all.
What's wrong with this picture?
In a time when business models for journalism as we've known it are
collapsing, ignoring hyperlocal and community media sites that don't
aspire to be mini-New York Times (I prefer the old NY Newsday, myself),
is just plain short-sighted.
Yes, it's true there's great work represented in the award winners, but
these awards are starting to feel like a map that's so incomplete
because several countries are missing.
ONA, wake up and grow up! Cut through your onerous bureaucracy and red
tape and add a category for community media and bring in journalists who
work for organizations with budgets of less than $1 MM to help judge--or
fact the face there's a growing category of media you just don't see.
I'm happy to help you make this happen--and I bet many of my fellow
local site operators, like the sites in the "Authentically Local"
network--would be happy to help as well. After all, many of us have been
ONA judges, committee members, chairs, etc--even if you don't "see" what
we do now.
As media changes, ONA needs to evolve as well. If this is an
organization that only recognizes mainstream news, you're missing out on
an emerging and vibrant category--and diminishing your own relevance in
the field.
Come on, ONA, you can do better. Unless you just don't care.
What's wrong with this picture?
In a time when business models for journalism as we've known it are
collapsing, ignoring hyperlocal and community media sites that don't
aspire to be mini-New York Times (I prefer the old NY Newsday, myself),
is just plain short-sighted.
Yes, it's true there's great work represented in the award winners, but
these awards are starting to feel like a map that's so incomplete
because several countries are missing.
ONA, wake up and grow up! Cut through your onerous bureaucracy and red
tape and add a category for community media and bring in journalists who
work for organizations with budgets of less than $1 MM to help judge--or
fact the face there's a growing category of media you just don't see.
I'm happy to help you make this happen--and I bet many of my fellow
local site operators, like the sites in the "Authentically Local"
network--would be happy to help as well. After all, many of us have been
ONA judges, committee members, chairs, etc--even if you don't "see" what
we do now.
As media changes, ONA needs to evolve as well. If this is an
organization that only recognizes mainstream news, you're missing out on
an emerging and vibrant category--and diminishing your own relevance in
the field.
Come on, ONA, you can do better. Unless you just don't care.
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Two things:
1. Looking at Saturday night's awards list, it was telling to see that the "small sites" winner in one category was a NEW YORK CITY radio station (unless I was reading it wrong). Small?
2. Given that those of us in the "hyperlocal" biz are among the small percentage of news sites that are EXCLUSIVELY online, you would think we would take precedence in something called an Online News Association!
Hi Susan,
Your passion, advocacy and expertise in hyperlocal journalism are helping drive our profession forward and as a friend and member of ONA you've contributed significantly to our outreach there.
As the awards committee chair, I'd like to invite you and any other ONA members who wish to shape the awards to join our committee. All ONA committees are open to members. Join and precipitate change. We have had strong voices on our committee from friends of hyperlocal and community journalism over the years, notably Lisa Williams of Placeblogger, who was also a judge these past two years.
Meantime, I want to dispel some unfortunate myths in your commentary.
First: ONA does acknowledge hyperlocal journalism and non-traditional journalistic practice as part of our core mission. Indeed we train people in how to engage it in as part of our ONA Camp and other activities. Our membership dues reflect our interest in ensuring everyone can participate. A 3 year membership is $50/year.
Also: Our awards have had for years multiple categories which seek to acknowledge hypterlocal efforts:
- We have a 'micro' category for general excellence and 'small' categories for a number of other awards
- We have two blogging categories, topical and commentary, which seek to acknowledge community voices "...using social tools to coalesce a participatory, online community around the topic," to quote our own category rules for topical; and "...especially blogging and community journalism and/or use of social tools to attract user response or action," to quote our rules for commentary
- We have a category for community media: It's called "community collaboration": "This award honors a news project or publication that produces outstanding journalism through strong interaction with the community being served. Examples include pro-am reporting efforts, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing. Creative use of the medium and the use of social tools to engage the community, along with user interface and interactivity, will also be considered. Judges will place special emphasis on the quality and quantity of contributions to the news product from the community."
- The Knight Award for Public Service is designed to acknowledge efforts at providing strong journalism for a local community.
Next: We have awarded hyperlocal and continue to do so. Cory Bergman's My Ballard and Tracy Record's West Seattle Blog have each won community collaboration, for instance, and GulfCoastNews, a one-man operation, won a service journalism award in 2006 for an amazing Katrina effort.
Importantly, you must enter to win. What we've found is that not many hyperlocal sites do. This year there were no winners in two of the smaller size categories for online commentary because the entry pool was not award-winning quality, although we know there are many such sites on the Web.
So we've dropped our entry fees for sole practitioners - site owners who have no other staff (except freelancers or contributors) - expressly to encourage bootstrapping journo-entrepreneurs. It is $50, or half the rate for others.
We also engaged in a coordinated Tweet campaign between ONA and our committee to encourage the community to 'call out' who should enter for specific categories. This raised awareness of our awards and improved the overall entry levels.
But we know we need to do more to encourage the hyperlocal community to participate.
We have also debated adding a category specifically attuned to local journalism. We welcome ONA members' input on that as part of our committee process for 2012 and beyond.