Last night I stood in the kind of hip club space I haven't visited since my 20s, jammed with nominees for the annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards. As the venue suggests, it wasn't your usual awards event: no sit-down tables and earnest acceptance speeches. Indeed the winners could barely be heard shouting out their thanks to the boisterous, drinking crowd, while awards host Amber Mac grew hoarse trying to announce the finalists in various categories. Certainly it captured the edgy, youthful spirit that defines online publishing today.
That spirit of course imbues our own upstart site here at HuffPost Canada, which was nominated for no fewer than eight awards including best news coverage for politics, the NDP leadership convention, our Mind The Gap series, and blogs by NDP MP Charlie Angus, our Media Bites columnist J.J. McCullough, and contributor Douglas Anthony Cooper.
So you can imagine how proud I was, as the former Managing Editor of Blogs here, to see our talented writers walk away with both the Gold and Silver awards for Best Blog in the daily and weekly newspapers, and broadcasters category.
Angus won the Gold for his newsbreaking blogs on the crisis of Attawapiskat (something none of us could pronounce a year ago); and McCullough took Silver for his smart, funny twice-weekly media commentary. Cooper's expose on the animal rights PETA, which did not win, remains one of the blog series I am most proud to have published during my time as editor: You can read the first part of the series here (links to subsequent parts are there).
Congratulations to all our nominees, and a special thanks to our elite blog squadron Angelina Chapin and Devon Murphy. Contributors who have had the pleasure of working with them, like me, know them to be among the most gracious, responsive and capable editors working in the country.