Inevitably US-centric: 32 awards and only two non-US winners. Both of those are from Spain, interestingly. Prisacom took best special feature in the million+ category, and ELPAIS.es deservedly took best overall design over 1 million. It was El Pais, I believe, that launched a particularly slick and forward-looking online magazine for teenagers about 18 months or so ago, but the link escapes me… Consistently excel themselves in terms of design anyway, resolving the central problem of presenting a wide range of information, services and subjects while keeping the page clean and useable, etc etc. Otherwise it’s the usual suspects: WashingtonPost.com took three awards in the million+ categories including best overall site, best classifieds for its cars service and best internet community service project too – that was for its interactive database of every recorded House and Senate vote since 1991. Bookshelves at Lawrence.com must be filling up with design awards – best design under 1 million. Blogs get a look-in too (Crime Scene KC, Houston Chronicle’s MeMo and USAToday.com’s Today In The Sky business blog) although there’s a cautious ‘media-affiliated’ requirement attached to these categories which rather misses the point – and no doubt excludes some excellent indy bloggers that could do with the profile. Gripes: The EPpy’s own site doesn’t have a list of winners yet. Both the list of winners on E&P and huge list of finalists on the EPpy site don’t link through to the entrant’s sites. And what’s going on in the UK? There’s a lot to celebrate in the UK but online is consistently overlooked in press and publishing award schemes. Maybe Americans are just better at awards?
Related: Greg Reeves (the Crime Scene KC blogger) told me that the specialist blog started seven months back and is an experiment for the paper, but ultimately the idea is for the blog to build up enough traffic to generate ad revenue. “I’m pretty sure management is looking at it in a relatively long-term time period. In other words, they’ll give me at least a year to succeed or fail!” Have faith. If you build it, they will come.
Update: El Pais’ site for teens is ep3.es – thanks John Burke!
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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