Blogs and blogging have been a part of the Internet for the last ten years. The Knight Foundation, in cooperation with Mediaweek and Linkedin, recognized this fact Wednesday when they gave the first ever EPpy awards for blogging to four news organizations.
The 13th annual EPpy Awards were given out during the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show, held this week at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
The award for Best Entertainment Blog went to Pop Candy, a section of USA Today. The blog, maintained by staff writer Whitney Matheson, began as a weekly column and is now in blog form, often updated several times a day. The other nominees included Copious Notes, a blog of Kentucky.com and LexGo.com, HandStamp and Kristin2Go, both blogs featured on chron.com of the Houston Chronicle, and Stuck in the ’80s featured on Tampabay.com.
Best Sports Blog accolades were given to The FanHouse, an America Online sports column. AOL employs a staff of sports writers who maintain the blog on a daily basis. FanHouse won out over three competitors, the Brewers Blog, hosted by the Journal-Sentinel Online, ChicagoSports, a division of the Rosenblog and The Memphis Edge, featured in Commercialappeal.com.
The Best Business Blog category had three contenders, Marketbeat.com a division of the Wall Street Journal Online, NYTimes.com/DealBook from the New York Times Online and USA Today. NYTimes.com, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, came out on top. Sorkin acknowledged the award on the blog Thursday saying, “Many thanks to all our loyal readers who have stuck with us since we started this crazy little experiment back in 2001.”
The final blogging category was for Best News and/or Politics Blog. In the running were Adam Radwanski, blogger for globeandmail.com, CNN Political Ticker at cnnpolitics.com, PoliticsWest.com, Stumper at Newsweek.com and The Swamp at chicagotribune.com. The winner in this category was The Swamp. The website has many contributing reporters and is updated several times daily.
All of the EPpy nominees were evaluated this year by a panel of 49 judges, all from various media outlets across the country. They are awarded on an annual basis by Editor and Publisher Magazine and Mediaweek.com, both publications dedicated to the media industry.
