This map shows recreational activites available in Rome and Northwest Georgia

Some of the winners were announced recently in the Georgia Press Association Better Newspaper Contest, and yours truly was involved in a couple winning entries. The Rome News-Tribune, where I am Web editor, competes in division B, for papers with daily circulation of 15,000 – 40,000.

I won an individual award, placing third for best online news project. They haven’t announced yet which project won, but I’m thinking it’s either a page of local candidate information from the November general election, an interactive map of attractions and recreation in Northwest Georgia, or a special site I made to house all our coverage of the 2008 Coosa Valley Fair.

Obviously, I’m really proud of this individual award, but I’m prouder of the first place award for a project I was in charge of. Our paper’s staff came in first in the Best Photo Gallery on a Newspaper Web site category.

The gallery was a collection of pictures from the first day of school here – every single school was represented. I was in charge of planning and implementing the gallery.

I had myself, two interns and three photographers available to hit every school. Before the day, I divided the county up into zones, and planned routes for everyone to get the schools in their zones. Most of us had 4-5 schools to photograph.

As the photos were turned in, I worked on the gallery. To present the photos, I chose the Simpleviewer flash gallery program. It’s free, and allowed me to use XML to post captions with each picture. One of my colleagues, education reporter Elizabeth Cady, even contributed her handwriting to be the header of the page.

This thing took HOURS to complete, and I’m so proud it was not only recognized, it was recognized as the top gallery that was entered.

Dan Savage, the editorial director of The Stranger, does not regret a single word he wrote in the wake of Proposition 8. He does regret the dismal state of reading comprehension today, as evidenced by the confused reaction to some of what he wrote. Mr. Savage would like to state for the record: “Your inability to read isn’t evidence that I’m racist.”

On June 4, Brendan Kiley posted this ad on The Stranger‘s classifieds page: “Wanted: Intern for The Stranger‘s Theater Section—the old one has lost consciousness. Must be reliable (seriously, no flakes), available on Monday and/or Tuesday afternoons, and believe mindless data entry is a means to getting head.” That should have read: “a means to getting ahead.” We regret the error, which confirmed everyone’s suspicions about us.

Stranger news reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee regrets once attempting to pitch a story to Stranger news editor Erica C. Barnett by announcing to her that “There’s this tree in Magnolia.” He has never lived it down.

Dan Savage, author of the internationally syndicated sex-advice column Savage Love and host of the Savage Lovecast, regrets using the phrase “that’s retarded” in his column and on his podcast when what he meant was “that’s stupid.” Using “retard” in that manner is, like, so totally gay.

Now that I’m here though I’m having a lovely time. I went to three seminars in this afternoon, and have at least two more to attend tomorrow. Weirdly, the one I’ve found most interesting was all about copyright law and the internet. Fascinating right? But the thing is, it really was. The time just flew by and I feel like I have a much better handle on how copyrights work, specifically with Web content.

The other two seminars I attended were about blogs — probably a little basic but I got some good ideas for blogs for our paper — and new technologies in journalism. At the beginning of that one, I was skeptical about how useful it wold be, but there was one idea I got that was probably worth the whole hour. I think we may be able to use Twitter in a good way, so I’m excited about that.

In a way, I wish I could stay through Sunday, but the budget just doesn’t allow that many nights in a fancy schmancy hotel. So I’m planning to get as much as possible out of my two days here.