Las Vegas Sun Web site wins award for General Excellence

Monday, Sept. 15, 2008 | 1:04 p.m.

Past Sun awards

The Las Vegas Sun brought an award from the nation’s capital to the desert this past weekend.

The Las Vegas Sun’s Web site picked up the General Excellence Award from the Online News Association. Winners were announced during the association’s annual Online Journalism Awards banquet Saturday at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C.

In addition to the win, the Sun’s Web site was nominated in the Breaking News category for its coverage of the Monte Carlo fire earlier this year, as well as for the Multimedia Feature Award for Boomtown, a video series that explores the history of Las Vegas.

Three awards are given in each category, small, medium and large, defined by the number of visitors a site receives. The Sun competed in the medium category. According to the ONA, the awards honor “excellence in digital journalism.”

“A winner with an impressive visual approach to journalism that helped them stand out as being a little bit different and very strong,” one judge wrote about the Sun’s site. “One of the best newspaper Web sites I have seen, with high quality multimedia content that is integral to the site, not an afterthought or secondary element.”

The other winners of a General Excellence Award were Army Times (small category) and CNN (large category). The Las Vegas Sun was the only newspaper Web site in Nevada to be nominated for an award.