Now is the time to enter the OJAs

The Online Journalism Awards include about $30,000 in prizes and the entry deadline is at the end of this month. They're among the top digital awards in the world.

You should check out the categories, because there is something for every digital journalist, from the small, solo practitioner to awards just right for television, including "Online Video Journalism" and "Multimedia Feature Presentation." Also, for those folks working in startups there is an award for technical innovation in the service of digital journalism.

Importantly, they will be announced at the Online News Association's annual conference, which this year will be in San Francisco from Oct. 1-3. So for those in the Bay Area, it's a unique opportunity. (I'm on the board of the organization and chairman of the awards committee -- full disclosure. I lobbied hard three years ago to get the conference to SF, so I'd love to see everyone there. But it is the one journalism conference that sells out these days.)

Those of you who would like to get a free pass to the conference can be a screener (a first-round judge) of our awards entries. The sign-up info is here.

What's bigger: All the newspaper.coms or Digg?

Read Diggnation in New York from Jeff Jarvis -- a post about the Web TV show spawned by the recommendation site "Digg." He notes that 2000 people attended the conference. First point: That's more than twice the number of people who attend the Online News Association's annual conference -- the one that I work on with a bunch of well-paid mainstream media types.

OK... it's not exactly apples-to-apples, because the Digg conference is a consumer conference -- i.e. for people who love the site -- and ONA is for industry people -- i.e. people who work in online news. But still.

Next, he notes that Digg received 26 million unique users (visitors) per month. OK so dallasnews.com receives about 2.6 million unique users per month. 1/10th the Digg number. Again, Digg is a national site and we're regional. But still.

One other thing: He mentions TWiT, one of my favorite iPod listens. It's a San Francisco based techie podcast by Leo LaPorte, a former Tech TV guy who went indie when TechTV died.

Leo's done an amazing job of creating a one-man-band podcasting franchise.His podcast reaches, I think, 200,000 people a week-- something that's possible today because you don't need radio or TV spectrum or infrastructure like you used to.

Those Tech TVguys offered me a job back in the day, which I turned down for newspaper.coms. But... still.

What is it about this new media, Web 2.0 world that we aren't quite tapping into?

Well, it's about tech, of course. But... still.

Awards deadline in two days

Just two days left to submit your great work for the 2008 Online Journalism Awards. To submit:

http://journalists.org/awards/

And don’t forget, if you want to have a say in the outcome of the awards and see some great work you might not otherwise see, sign up to be a screener of the awards.

As a thank you to screeners who step up and complete their assignments early, the ONA is offering an incentive. The first 20 who finish screening all their assigned sites will receive free registration to this year's ONA conference, Sept. 11-13, at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C., worth $399 for members and $699 for non members:

http://journalist.org/awards/archives/001112.php.