Newspaper’s online site wins award for innovations

SpokesmanReview.com, the newspaper’s Web site, has won the 2005 Online Journalism Award for general excellence among medium-size sites, beating out PBS’ “Frontline,” New York’s Newsday and Chicago’s CBS 2.

The award was announced Saturday night in New York.

In selecting SpokesmanReview.com, judges for the Online News Association said they were impressed by the newspaper’s efforts to make journalism more transparent with such features as:

“Daily Briefing, where the staff critiques the paper and plans news coverage.

“News is a Conversation, which allows readers to talk about news coverage.

“Ask the Editors, where editors reply to readers’ questions.

“We’re pretty lucky because management and staff have been pretty accepting of some of the experiments we have tried,” said Ryan Pitts, who accepted the award. He represented the online staff of Gina Boysun, Ken Paulman and publisher Ken Sands.

Sands said the Web site and the newspaper are one and the same.

“We have a small online staff,” he said. “The only reason we won is that our print staff works in an online environment. We’re the pioneers in that.”

The Online Journalism Awards received 600 English-language entries from Web sites worldwide.

The contest was judged by a team of journalists during a two-day event at the University of Southern California.