The New Haven Independent’s experiments over the past year in taking its communal conversation to a new level have won an honorable mention award in a national media competition.
The winners of the competition, the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, were announced Wednesday. The top award went to a project called Storify.
Click here to read about all the winners.
The Independent won honorable mention for two separate projects.
One was a school-reform multimedia town meeting involving two separate panels, a live audience, and a live-blogging discussion featuring author Diane Ravitch and more than a dozen New Haven teachers, students, administrators, parents, and advocates. (Click here, hereand here to read about that.) The event was funded by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. Other media outlets including WTNH, WNPR, the Register and the Courant participated in the program and invited their web readers into the conversation.
The other project for which the Independent was cited is an ongoing series launched in conjunction with NBC30, called “New Haven’s Talking.” It features discussions at Bru Cafe with newsmakers and readers about stories that have generated extensive reporting and commenting in the Independent, such as controversies at the police department and the privatization of school custodian jobs. Video versions of the discussion appear on NBC30’s news program as well as on the Independent, where reader discussion continues. Click here, here and here to watch episodes.
Another honorable mention winner, the San Francisco Bay Citizen, was recognized for its “Bike Tracker” project, which “plots thousands of Bay Area bike collisions on an interactive map that discloses individual accidents, key locations and road conditions.”
The awards will be given out in September in a ceremony at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.