Monday mornings are often tough, especially when coming down with a head cold. Fortunately Paid Content pointed me to an uplifting entry, about the Online News Association’s 2005 awards. A look over the nominees and their work was the prescription to get me going.

Congratulations to Rafat Ali, principal voice behind Paid Content, which was nominated in the category of small specialty news sites. That was one of 18 categories. There were 69 entries in all. The awards page is worth scanning to see some of the best work being done online.

Among the entries that caught my eye was the Center for Public Integrity’s nomination under enterprise news for small sites for an online series called Outsourcing the Pentagon. It’s a huge topic, poorly or not at all covered by mainstream media. Bravo!

I also noted that Jonathan Weber, formerly of Industry Standard and a familiar face in West Coast media, won a nomination for a narrative story done on his New West online publication that is paving the way for a print magazine scheduled to debut next year.

And John Paczkowski won a nomination for online commentary in a small medium for the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog he has been writing since 1996.

I gather that the winners will be announced the closing dinner for Online News Association’s annual meeting which will be held Oct. 27 through 29 in New York. The awards are run by the University of South California’s Annenberg School of Communications. (Click for membership details.)

Quickly, in closing, a site called Chicagocrime.org won a separate award from the Batten Foundation. According to the award press release, online journalist Adrian Holovaty and designer Wilson Miner created a site that allows vistors to search by type of crime, the street, neighborhood, or date, and to pinpoint the location on a satellite map. What a concept! The Batten win came with a $10,000 award.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media