L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

05 October 2009 Blog Home : October 2009 : Permalink

Award Winning Journalism?

So the BBC mentioned casually this morning that they had won an Online Journalism Award, which sounded promising until they added that one of the other winners was the New York Times. And indeed this is true:

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Large Site
nytimes.com, The New York Times
The New York Times stands above others. What I like about the way they use technology is that they are really thinking about their readers. The content is superb. The elegance of their photo editing stands out. In the digital area they are more innovative than others. IN terms of execution, in terms of content, in terns of just about everything you can think about, these guys hit it. When I consider general excellence I consider every department on that site. There's no question about it to me, the New York Times comes out on top.

Which kinda clashed with some other people's views of the NY Times online. Firstly there's the list of recent journalism failures (Van Jones, Acorn etc.) which led some poor woman to say:

someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, "I had to answer 'no' because I get all my news from The New York Times."

And then there's the real no-no of stealthy rewrites, such as this recent one regarding the Chicago Olympics fail:
I think the OJA has just proven itself to be a complete waste of time. Unless of course they were confused and meant to ward the York New Times of York, England but got confused?