Awards co-presenter Bonnie Fuller
TechWeb's Internet Evolution team (photos by Yumiko Tsukada)
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Winner: Entertainment Weekly for EW.com PopWatch
EW’s PopWatch transforms a blog medium from personal diary to full-blown publishing platform. Nearly two dozen daily posts embody the range of critical voices at the magazine site, reflecting (sometimes snarking) at all aspects of popular culture, from film to video games, celebrities to online viral video outbreaks. The sheer diversity of opinion and coverage makes this a “blog” of a high sort. Like a magazine, the blog has generated franchises (“Things That Make Me Die Inside” and “Inappropriate Crushes”) so readers can find regular hooks into the coverage that encourages frequent revisits. Rather than go narrow, PopWatch benefits by going wide, showing a catholic taste for all things trendy and worthy of note and response. The site offers readers a voice and response against the onrush of hype and entertainment industry detritus that clogs the news cycles. And it brings to bear on everything it observes genuine critical insight from a team of critic/journalists who think before they hype. The entries have the polish of familiar magazine editorial (more like a never-ending front-of-book section) but the voices remain personal and provocative. The long scrolls of reader commentary (up to 2,000 for some items) are testament to PopWatch’s ability to engage the audience. The superb “Nightstand Inspection” feature lets the readers share their own PopWatch agenda. EW.com adds over 2.6 million page views a month to its traffic with PopWatch, a site that deservedly doubled its usage in a year. This is blogging as a publishing platform.
Winner: Newsweek for Newsweek.com – Stumper
 The core legacy of blogging is personal reflection, a singular voice applied to an experience, a moment, a life. When that format is energized by the drama of a presidential campaign, and fully funded by a major news organization, the blog becomes an invaluable historical record that adds perspective. Newsweek’s associate editor Andrew Romano and his chronicle of the 2008 race for the presidency went the extra mile (thousands of miles, actually) to give readers a unique angle on a race that was covered so predictably and tediously elsewhere in the press. He worked the crowds and walked the same pavement as the candidates and reflected on the campaign out of that raw experience. Stumper captured experiences that eluded much of the media. In one exemplary post, “You Want Caucus? We’ve Got Caucus,” he went behind the locked doors of an Iowa caucus meeting and brought us along with him away from the jaded perspective of political coverage. “I've written the word ‘caucus’ so many times that it's almost ceased to mean anything,” Romano wrote. “That changed tonight when I actually sat through one of these quaint, chaotic events.” Stumper brought readers on the ground in a way TV cameras and three-minute spot reporting can’t. He tested the memes emerging on the campaign (“maverick,” “elitist”) with real people in the audiences and effectively countered punditry with classic, grassroots reporting.
Honorable Mentions:
Cookie Magazine for Nesting: With virtual tours of real spaces designed by real moms, Cookiemag.com’s Nesting blog both inspires and connects its audience with each other through their own tastes and DIY projects.
Forbes.com for Rich Karlgaard/Digital Rules Blog: Forbes publisher and Life 2.0 author Karlgaard brings it straight to the people in this highly informed and opinionated blog on all aspects of the digital and larger economy. His frank voice pokes through the usual business coverage with a voice that speaks directly to the reader.
Glamour Magazine for Smitten: This daily and provocative take on relationships and sex so effectively navigates the shoals of frankness and propriety, and is so engaging to readers, that it has become an anchor for the rest of the site and a lure for new readers.
The New Yorker for “The Balance Sheet” Blog by James Surowiecki on newyorker.com: Respected financial commentator Surowiecki breaks from the weekly print schedule just in the nick of time. Launched in tandem with the fall financial meltdown, the blog soon became necessary reading both for market watchers and for other pundits and journalists. He became our market “explainer” at the moment we needed one.
Sporting News for The Sporting Blog: TSN brings it’s A-game to this daily scroll of the best insights from the staff’s best commentators. Around it, TSN also deftly includes the best responses from it sown stable of reader-experts.
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