New York Times Wins $10,000 Knight-Batten Prize
July 23, 2009 · Filed Under Award-Winning Work, Great Work Gallery
The New York Times swept top honors in the 2009 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with six striking entries that netted the $10,000 Grand Prize for a dynamic body of work in the past year. Five $1,000 Special Distinction Awards, including one for Nonprofit Journalism, and a $1,000 Citizen Media Award were also announced.
The Times’ body-of-work award honors initiatives created in the newsroom and the technology department:
- Represent, which helps city residents keep tabs on their elected officials, culling information from dozens of sources into a Facebook-style activity feed.
- Document Reader, which allows documents to be posted online in a clean interface that allows searching, bookmarking, comments and annotations.
- Custom Times, a prototype for personalized Times news reports that seamlessly transition across print, Web, mobile, television and even the car.
- Debate Analysis Tool, a replicable tool that allowed users to watch the 2008 presidential debates and speeches on demand with a searchable transcript scrolling simultaneously alongside.
- Living with Less, engaging audio and video portraits of peoples’ lives that have been upended by the recession.
- One Word, a replicable tool that asked users on Election Day to share “What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?“
Winning $1,000 Special Distinction Awards are:
- Printcasting, a Web site that allows people to create niche magazines for their communities from their own blog posts and from other blogs and publications that have registered on the site. Advertisers can create their own ads and target which magazines to appear in. Revenues are shared.
- Apture, a powerful multimedia program that allows Web content creators to embed images, video, audio and screen grabs into articles so that the content pops up in a small window in the same screen, allowing users to get more information without opening new windows or tabs.
- Change Tracker, a Web application developed at ProPublica that monitors content changes on www.whitehouse.gov and that is being shared to allow other news organizations to monitor Web sites.
- Patchwork Nation, a Web site shared by The Christian Science Monitor and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that uses reams of demographic data to track how the nation’s 3,100-plus counties are dealing with an era of dramatic changes in politics, culture and the economy.
Winning a $1,000 Citizen Media Award for innovative and useful citizen participation:
- MyReporter.com, an-easy-to use vehicle by the Star News in Wilmington, N.C., that lets people ask questions and get answers from reporters that are cataloged for future reference.
Winning a $1,000 Special Distinction Award for Nonprofit Journalism is The Center for Public Integrity for its innovative uses of digital tools to unpack complex topics in a body of work that included:
- Broken Government. A searchable assessment of 120 executive branch failures of the Bush administration.
- Tobacco Underground: The Booming Global Trade in Smuggled Cigarettes. An exposé of the black market for tobacco by 17 journalists in 13 countries.
- Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown? An interactive look at the nation’s top 25 sub-prime lenders and their Wall Street backers.
The judges also cited 21 projects as notable entries. Check them out here.
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