I’m unforgivably late to the party, but turns out some nice things were said about Media Darlings at last week’s AirNZ Best Blog Awards. While the tobacco fiasco was too recent to be eligible, judge and Tumeke! blogger Bomber Bradbury had this to say about our stuff from last year:

OOOOOOOOh they are sharp aren’t they? Very good demolition of ACT on campus, good chase on National’s support of VSM, and excellent post on academic freedom. If this is the future of our news rooms, things are not as bad as they seem.

Unfortunately his collaborator Tim Selwyn wasn’t quite so impressed:

Earnest, researched, sober – and being about tertiary education, very dull. Striking an almost neutral pose it reads more like a policy journal than a blog.

Oh well, you can’t win them all. Unless you’re Amanda Fisher, who was at the Actual Media Awards on Saturday and took home the prize for Best Student Journalism. Fisher is also a winner of this year’s Bruce Jesson Emerging Journalism prize (along with me, the Herald‘s Michael Dickison, RNZ’s Motoko Kakubayashi, international music journo Sarah Taane and Westport News‘ Chloe Vaughan) for a series we did last year on a group of Masterton residents who were unaware their homes were built on toxic soil.

That’s about it for now, really. There’s plenty to do back at the Scoop offices, I don’t have an interesting or nuanced perspective on the seabed and foreshore and Twitter is basically crowdsourcing satire these days, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks I guess. Thanks for reading; see you all in a bit.

P.S. – New bloggers welcome! If you’re a student journalist, journalism student or someone who’s recently graduated and would be interested in contributing to Media Darlings, please feel free to drop me an email. Cheers!