CNN.com wins ONA award for general excellence

(CNN) -- The Online News Association, an organization committed to inspiring innovation and excellence among journalists to best serve the public, recognized CNN.com for general excellence at its annual conference on Saturday evening.

The General Excellence award honors sites that successfully fulfill their editorial mission, effectively serve their audience, maximize the Web's characteristics and represent the highest journalistic standards, according to the organization.

CNN.com won the award for large sites, with the panel commenting that the site "made substantial changes in the past year, making it one of the more dynamic destinations out there."

The judges also remarked that CNN.com "takes user content seriously and integrates it into the whole, opening a new era of networked content."

Last summer, CNN.com relaunched the Web site, pioneering integrated multimedia story-telling online, enhancing the presentation of live video, offering quick links to local news and providing new features to make coverage more accessible than ever.

This year, CNN launched iReport.com to create a destination where users could share stories and participate in the newsgathering process. Citizen journalists' accounts and images, which are often the first to be filed from the scene of a story, are regularly incorporated into the network's online and on air coverage.

"We are pleased that the ONA has honored CNN.com with one of their most prestigious awards," said Rena Golden, senior vice president, executive producer of CNN.com. "We're evolving CNN.com constantly to provide an experience in which articles, videos, images and user-generated content come together to give users a more enriching, immediate interaction with the news and information they need and want."

In the General Excellence category, the Las Vegas Sun was recognized for medium sites and the Army Times led the pack of small sites. ElPais.com and Soitu.es, both based in Spain, won the inaugural General Excellence awards for non-English language sites.

Other top winners included the Washington Post, which won the Knight Public Service prize for an interactive investigative series, "Fixing D.C.'s Schools." The New York Times was recognized for breaking news for its coverage of the sex scandal that caused New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to resign.

The Online News Association was founded in 1999 by members of the online press. It has more than 1,200 members, including news writers, producers, designers, editors and photographers, whose principal livelihood involves gathering or producing news for digital presentation, according to the organization's Web site.