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The annual EPpy Awards, put on by Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek, were just announced in Las Vegas. NYTimes.com and LJWorld.com won in the best news site categories. KING5.com took the best overall TV-affiliated site award (woo hoo!), edging out our friends at WRAL and Fox Chicago. MSNBC.com and DenverPost.com won in the best community site categories. And CNN.com (with iReport) won the Knight News innovation award. Full list of winners here. Congrats, everyone!

Editor & Publisher
The Times wins for Best Business Blog, Best News Website and Best Overall Newspaper-Affiliated Website. USA Today wins in the Best Entertainment Blog and Best Sports Website categories. PLUS: More winners.

New York Review of Magazines
Students in the magazine department at Columbia University j-school -- advised by Victor Navasky -- have put out another issue of the New York Review of Magazines. The first issue was published in 2001.

And so we copy editors thought this whole presidential politics and international relations and what to call what was complicated enough already ...

Read this from the Miami Herald's James Burnett:

It is short-sighted and disingenuous for my elevated peers to keep referring to Obama as black or African American. He is biracial.

And while his skin color...and Clinton's gender, and McCain's age shouldn't matter in terms of their qualifications, how we address those characteristics should matter to you.

Oh yeah. Let the fun begin.

The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of its Knight News Challenge 2008 competition:

Sixteen ideas to fund innovative digital projects around the world were awarded $5.5 million dollars today from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, accepted one of the awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

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We've talked in this blog before about the prospect of using Twitter for news. Now the Wichita Eagle is showing a dramatic example. You can follow their twitterstream of a high-profile local trial and see it happen, pretty much in real time.

UPDATE: The Journal of the American Bar Association has an extensive article about reporter Ron Sylvester's Twittering (Tweeting?) online. One of his posts was "One juror forgot to turn off his cell phone. Ring tone: "Carry On My Wayward Son," by Kansas."

Here's a taste:

Trial junkies following the high-profile prosecution of a Wichita man accused in the contract killing of a pregnant 14-year-old girl can get continual, brief updates at Twitter.com from a reporter covering the trial.

Reporter Ron Sylvester is covering the trial of defendant Theodore Burnett for the Wichita Eagle, but he’s also submitting updates to Twitter, described as “a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

In Sylvester’s case, those reading his Twitter posts are his newspaper readers. His first Twitter message today read simply: “The capital murder trial of Ted Burnett began this morning.” Later, Sylvester described the opening arguments of prosecutor Marc Bennett, who contends Burnett took a mere $500 to kill Chelsea Brooks for Brooks’ older boyfriend, who feared he would be prosecuted for statutory rape.

The Twitter entries are short, no more than 140 characters, but they are frequent. In just the first hour of the trial, Sylvester wrote 20 posts.

Burnett is charged with aggravated kidnapping and capital murder, according to a Wichita Eagle summary of the case. That page also houses the latest Twitter updates as Sylvester posts from the courthouse. The victim's boyfriend, Elgin Robinson, is scheduled to stand trial in September.

Sylvester uses a T-Mobile Dash phone and a Bluetooth foldable keyboard to send his updates to Twitter through text messaging. He always asks for permission before bringing his equipment into a courtroom, and judges are amenable.

Radar Online
Charles Kaiser hears that an announcement could come as early as today. He says columnist David Ignatius and managing editor Phil Bennett are the leading inside candidates to succeed Leonard Downie Jr. (For what it's worth, Kaiser's brother is Post associate editor Robert Kaiser. CHARLES WRITES TO ROMENESKO: "Robert is indeed my brother but he is almost never a source when I'm reporting a Post story. The one about his boss was not an exception.")

Minnesota Monitor | Star Tribune
David Hanners admits that asking another paper to fire a columnist -- the Strib's Katherine Kersten, in this case -- "is a grave step and one I don't take lightly...but on a professional level, when Kersten [writes] stuff like this, it reflects upon all of us who have to go out there day after day and try to get people to talk to us for stories." The Pioneer Press reporter adds: "While columnists should be granted wide latitude in expressing opinion, they -- like reporters -- have to maintain fidelity to facts." || Kersten writes: "I'm reviled on a daily basis as the poorest excuse for a journalist since ... well, since there was journalism."

> TV health reporters often re-voice stories done by outsiders (Deggans)
> Minnesota pols tell audio/video-equipped reporters to get lost (Strib)
> Why did the Forward pass over Newhouse for editor position? (HuffPost)
> Report: Star Tribune newsroom budget to be cut by 10% (MinnPost.com)
> Margolis: Good journalism requires more than just journalistic skills (CCJ)
> WP film critic Hunter looks primed for big things as a novelist (W'tonian)
> Sources say about 30 at News & Observer accepted paper's buyout (TBN)
> Shafer: Why the reverential treatment of Rauschenberg in obits? (Slate)
> Onetime foes Colorado Daily, Daily Camera now share space (Westword)
> Ex-OC Register publisher Anderson named visiting prof at ASU (E&P)
> Send link suggestions, letters, etc. to jromenesko@poynter.org
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Austin American-Statesman | Romenesko Memos
Michael Levy, who launched Texas Monthly in 1973, writes in his retirement announcement: "People who remember 'the good ol' days' have bad memories. It was scary. Our offices were in a walk-up with the Xerox on my desk so I could count the copies people were making. Gas coming through the heating system giving us awful headaches. Bats flying around. Too many times we should have been forced out of business. If our printer had not forgotten to send us a bill for the first six months because we were so small, we would have been bankrupt."

Philly.com
"When cameras roll, a lot of the extras stroll, making the newsroom look less librarylike -- and with a younger staff -- than usual," writes Peter Mucha. Former Inky columnist and "Marley" author John Grogan is played by Owen Wilson.

It took a decade and a half to get there, but CNET finally is making it big in the TV business. Now, the $1.8 billion question is whether CNET can help CBS make it bigger in the Internet business. On track to have its shares acquired for a juicy 45% premium by CBS, CNET originally was formed as CNET-TV in 1993 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie to create a technology channel for cable television

Romenesko Memos
Fred Schulte and June Arney win for their stories exposing real estate speculators who use an arcane law to seize the homes of Baltimore residents over debts that sometimes amount to little more than pocket change.

Now there’s a second huge writedown of the value of a recent newspaper purchase.

* Lee and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, from Paid Content:
Back in March, newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE) warned that it would take a $500-$700 million non-cash hit related to its $1.4 billion purchase of Pulitzer in 2005. We’d wondered previously when that would happen, given that all of the other newspaper deals have resulted in major writedowns. In a 10-Q filing (via AP) last night, the company confirmed that it had written down $721.9 million worth of goodwill related to that deal. It also warned that the final numbers aren’t set in stone, and could still change considerably.

* Earlier, the Minneapolis Star Tribune was written down twice: McClatchy had bought the paper for $1.2 billion and took a bath when it sold the orphan for $530 million and now the purchaser, Avista, has written that down by 75 percent. By my calculation, that’s a drop from $1.2 billion to $130 million — essentially a drop to 10 percent of its value only a decade ago.

And it’s not as if anyone is going to see that the price is so low it’s worth buying a paper now. Only a fool will do that. Witness Cablevision and Newsday.

Congratulations to the sixteen winners who split $5.5. million on various projects that advance communicating news and information in the public interest using open-source digital technology focused on geographic community. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, received a grant to address issues surrounding sourcing and accuracy online. The 2008 awards were smaller than the inaugural round last year, and many projects were internationally focused.

Now that the news is official, I can break the silence. Yes, I had a proposal that made the top 25 finalists. Of course it is disappointing to show and not place, but the winners and other finalists who didn’t get funded have amazing ideas and it is an honor to be in this company. There were 3,000 applicants this year.

I’m at the Berkman Center’s 10th Anniversary conference — amazing agenda and people.

Being a Berkman Fellow has been one of the joys of my recent years, getting to hang around with — and pick the brains of — a bunch of folks who are much smarter than I am and who possess knowledge and wisdom.

Here’s a page with webcasts of the event.

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At OPA in London, Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor, tells a success story from his Facebook app. Local Picks — which enables users to give their opinions on restaurants and such — attracted 1.4 million new reviews and ratings. That’s invaluable content. That’s thinking like a platform.

The World Editors Forum has begun posting its 2008 Newsroom Barometer -- the results of a survey of more than 700 newspaper editors on the future of news -- including predictions about integrated print-Web newsrooms and the rise of multimedia and multi-skilled journalists.  

Meanwhile, the forum's weblog is running a series of interviews with, as its name might suggest, some of the world's top editors. It's fascinating to compare the responses to the question "How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?" Hint: Almost all say they've considered themselves "news" or "information" organizations for some time, "newspaper" being just a "distribution channel."

Even true-believers in journalism seem to be turning to what one calls an "almost platform-agnostic" integrated newsroom. (That link goes to a preview of New York Times digital news editor Jim Roberts' presentation to the forum's conference in Sweden next month.)

Here's the list of interviewees, including already-posted transcripts and publications expected to participate:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

Thanks to Mich Sineath's AEJMC Members Forum for pointing out this discussion.

Association of Alternative Newsweeklies
LA Weekly leads the pack with finalists in eight different categories. Santa Fe Reporter and Washington City Paper closely follow with six finalists in five different categories.

Kansas City Star
Mike Fannin has been the Star's managing editor/sports and features. He replaces Mark Zieman, who was promoted to publisher in March.