Online News Squared ™

CNN.com; HuffingtonPost.com; NYTimes.com; Politico.com and Reuters.com named as finalists for General Excellence, Large Sites. For medium: LasVegasSun.com; MinnesotaPublicRadio.com; Truthdig; and WRAL.com. Small: Army Times; CQPolitics.com; NewWest.net; and RapidCityJournal.com.

Full list here, including links to entries.

Winners announced next month at the Online News Association conference in Washington.

Squared was tickled to be one of the judges this year and thinks his colleagues (look for their names in the release) did fabulous and enormously thoughtful work not only in all the prep work needed in the runup to final judging, but also in the long hours holed up together in conference rooms whittling down the actual finalists.

Favorite phrase of judgeapalooza was from Meredith Artley of LATimes.com, with “Stuck-on Syndrome,” referring to entries that clearly were just print packages for which a few multimedia gee-gaws were “stuck on”  for online.