The New York Times was the big winner at the 2009 Online Journalism Awards, taking both general excellence and outstanding use of digital technologies. The more interesting names on the list were smaller.
MyBallard, a hyperlocal site covering one Seattle neighbourhood, took the first community collaboration award. Gotham Gazette, a New York City news site, won general excellence in the micro site category. Both were the kind of operation that had no equivalent category to enter a few years earlier.
A new award for technical innovation in digital journalism, backed by the Gannett Foundation, marked the growing role of engineering in the field. It went to Publish2, a two-year-old start-up building collaborative linking tools for journalists — a piece of newsroom infrastructure rather than a publication.
It was the tenth annual ceremony, closing the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and the reading offered here was that the winners were a rough sketch of what news organisations were about to look like: a large legacy title doing ambitious digital work, small local sites doing reporting that scale had abandoned, and toolmakers treated as part of journalism rather than as suppliers to it.