At Thursday’s EPpy Awards luncheon, held during the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Showin Las Vegas, CNN.com was given top honors, winning the 2008 Knight News Innovation Award.
2008 is only the second year this particular award has been given. In 2007, the winner was Public Insight Journalism, a branch of American Public Media who produces programming for public radio.
CNN saw competition this year from three other news outlets, The Northwest Herald for their series The McCullom Lake Brain Cancer Lawsuits, The Match, an interactive news article from Newsday.com and Politifact.com a division of the St. Petersburg Times.
CNN’s win was due, in part, to the creation of iReport. iReport is an entirely user-generated news section of CNN’s website. According to their statistics, the site generated 102,423,915 reports world-wide last month. They are currently in the process of adding a feature which lets users know exactly where the posts they read are being reported from.
One of the media conference’s general sessions discussed the importance of citizen journalism, like what’s practiced on iReport. The session, which focused on social networking and the media’s ability to connect with its users, was paneled by Beth Murphy, Director of Marketing at Digg.com, Jim Sexton, Senior Vice President and Editorial Director of SPC Digital and Kim Patrick Kobza, President and C.E.O. of Neighborhood America.
The panel agreed that partnering news with getting people involved in their communities was important and key to the future of online reporting. Kobza said that he felt citizens had to work with the government in this way to continue to deal with problems like the economy and national security and the threat of terrorism. “We’ve got to be good at it,” he said, “we have no choice.”
