Co-Winner: Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker’s Watching TV
Ken Tucker really loves TV, and it shows. His morning roundup of the previous night’s great (and regrettable) viewing has become a fixture at the EW site and the core of EW’s real-time coverage of the medium.
Tucker seems to have multiple sets on all day, and yet he is far from a couch potato. He reports about who is on what show during the day, and reflects on the prime-time developments of the night before with wit and insight. He levels frank opinions on what to watch and what to avoid. But most of all, Tucker is the buddy who wants to chat about your thoughts. At every turn he invites readers to turn his column into a watercooler of shared opinion. And his readers take the bait. Some posts elicit literally hundreds of responses from a user base that visits him steadily throughout the day.
Tucker makes great use of multimedia as well. His embedded video clips not only highlight the telling moments you missed but also unearths bits and pieces of TV history for the true aficionados of the medium. A great online columnist knows his stuff, loves his stuff and is eager to share his stuff with a community. Tucker tunes us in to everything we missed on TV and turns us on to thinking harder about what we all watched.
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Co-Winner: Penton Media/Telephony Online, What the FCC Didn’t Tell Us About the USF Audit
Investigative journalism is critical to the vitality and role that trade publishers play in their business segments, and TelephonyOnline columnist Joan Engebretson proves this admirably in her scrutiny of an FCC report on the Universal Service Fund (USF). The FCC had found that the government overpaid telephone companies $970 million for servicing rural areas of the country. Engebretson discovered that the real overage was much lower—closer to $199 million. She revealed that some companies had their entire funding deemed erroneous because of minor filing errors.
Her conclusion was that the FCC may have politicized the auditing process in order to rationalize further reforms to the system. Engebretson held the government’s feet to the fire and did what a trade journalist ideally should do—poke through the fog created by all special interests in an industry.
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Honorable Mentions
FierceMarkets/Fierce Wireless – AT&T’s Mobile Broadband House of Cards: Editor Lynnette Luna framed an important question for the industry: How do wireless providers successfully market a new broadband service without overburdening their own networks with users and becoming victims of success?
TechWeb/Internet Evolution – How to Lose Your Job by Being an Internet Idiot: Social media columnist Nicole Ferraro sparked a weeklong online debate among users about the problems of company employees speaking freely (even wildly) on the liberating new medium of social networks.
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