New-Age Tech Sites Sweep Journalism Awards

Two cutting-edge technology savvy websites have won this year's coveted Knight-Batten awards for Innovations in Journalism. The $10,000 Grand Prize winner is TechPresident.com, a data-rich, politically neutral group-blog that covers real-time, online activity of the 2008 American presidential candidates and archives online content from voters who will elect them.

TechPresident.com invites regular people to help break campaign news and tracks voter-generated videos on YouTube, candidate 'friends' on MySpace and Facebook, blog mentions on Technorati, voter demands for appearances on Eventful, and voter-generated photos on Flickr. TechPresident.com currently has an Alexa ranking of 1,42,562.

"The site not only reports but also encourages citizens to participate more directly in the political process," said the panel of judges. "It’s an amazing source of information from a non-traditional news outlet." The site is published by the Personal Democracy Forum.

The Wild Card Award was won by Reuters' Second Life Virtual News Bureau. The bureau, operating in the popular online 3D-world Second Life, applies Reuters’ journalistic techniques to social networking, e-commerce and user-generated content for more than 7 million users. "It’s a place for the audience that newspapers don’t have to gather," the judges said. Reuters' Second Life Virtual News Bureau is headed by bureau chief Adam Pasick whose Second Life avatar is 'Adam Reuters'.

The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism honour the late James K. Batten, former CEO of Knight Ridder newspapers. Since 1950, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has granted awards to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression.