The European online journalism awards (which I helped judge) were handed out last night at a ceremony in London last night, all on a much-reduced scale from last year. One thing didn't change from previous years: the BBC cleaned up, with eight prizes from the 17 on offer (see the full list here). That's fair enough: even if the BBC's massively resourced online operation is funded from the licence fee, thus sparing them of the realities of a commercial operation, they still deserve kudos for what they're trying to do with online media.
But I was sorry my colleagues at Guardian Unlimited didn't win anything: there's always an element of the bizarre about any awards ceremony, but for GU to draw a blank after an amazing year for them (and a bucketload of prizes last year) was particularly odd. Hopefully their luck will return next year.
Of the rest of the awards, it was a very mixed bag. I thought the Scotsman's coverage of the Lockerbie trial verdict was very good - one of the best things I marked, but after making the shortlist it didn't win either. That was a shame - it was one of the few entries I saw (I didn't mark any GU or BBC stories) which attempted to use new media methods to tell the story, rather than simply cutting and pasting newspaper-style copy into a template. Going a step further is not rocket science - a link to audio here, a link to video there, a PDF of the verdict - but this kind of thoughtful net journalism cropped up very rarely indeed.
Seems to me there are dozens of weblogs, being run part-time out of bedrooms, which could teach a few large media organisations a thing or two about interactive storytelling.
