Congratulations to online journalist and software engineer Adrian Holovaty, whose chicagocrime.org today won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.
Created as a public service by Chicago resident Holovaty, with design input from Wilson Miner, chicagocrime.org lets users map where crimes have been reported, by type of crime, neighborhood, and date. The site utilizes Google’s satellite mapping service to show where crimes happened. Users can even draw routes and find what crimes have occured along route. The technologies that Holovaty developed for the site can be used in any city or town.
Four other new media services won Batten Awards.
The $2,000 first prize was awarded to The View, Interactive Magazine Online (IMOL), a quarterly netcast in which ‘backpack journalists’ from England, South Africa, and the U.S. tell stories from particular points-of-view.
And $1,000 Awards of Distinction were given to ‘Town Square‘, a citizen journalism initiative by The News & Record of Greensboro, South Carolina; to Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism projective, whose Idea Generator helpspeople suggest stories; and to Newsday‘s ‘The Cost of War‘ series.
The Batten Awards are funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland. The Awards were presented at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
This year’s Batten Award judges were Bryan Monroe, Knight Ridder assistant vice president/news; Mark Hinojosa, associate managing editor, electronic news, the Chicago Tribune; Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project; Andrew Nachison, co-director, The Media Center at the American Press Institute; Jody Brannon, executive producer