We've been talking so much about the Chronicle and the SF Weekly lately that perhaps one of our best-known local pubs is feeling a bit ignored. Editor & Publisher Magazine has published a feature spotlighting "10 That Do It Right." E&P selects a new list every summer from the nation's daily and weekly newspapers. E&P says it's not a "Top 10" list, but rather "a hat tip to a variety of publications which have, through excellence or innovation, shown the way in one area or another, such as news coverage, circulation, design, diversity or online."...

Jill Tucker's series on Junior ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corp) and Nanette Asimov's features on California's special education program have won top honors in the 2006 John Swett Award for Media Excellence, which is the California Teachers Association's highest honor for media professionals....

Most of the news about print journalism is a little depressing -- circulation is down, money is tight, etc, etc. So it gives us immense pleasure when we can share a little positive news. Evidently, there's something called the "Best of the West" Contest for print journalism, an award given yearly by First Amendment Funding Inc. in a variety of categories. While we can't claim to ever have heard of it before today, we......

Who Pays For 7x7? Suckers, that's who. A treatise on the quality of this magazine is perhaps best left for another day, and for other people to make. After all, what business do we, a ground-floor, citizen-based blog enterprise, have bashing our betters in the antique (i.e., published using "ink") media? However, we will say this: were we ever to actually want to read 7x7, we would never pay for it. It's free everywhere.......

So color us surprised when Adriel Hampton sent us a note asking if we wanted to join him in a chat with some South Asian media professionals in town on a junket with the State Department. Apparently they wanted to learn more about these "blog" things, and how they relate to journalism, both online and in print. When we found out that the representatives from the different publications represented a readership numbering in the......

Hey, congratulations to local magazine Dwell (on contemporary design and architecture) for winning the National Magazine Association's prestigious "Ellie" award, for best magazine with circulation from 100,000 to 250,000! Dwell beat out Baseline, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Magazine, and Teacher Magazine for the cute li'l Alexander Calder elephant statuette. In other local Ellie Award news, San Francisco Magazine was nominated for an article about the Santa Clara Law School Innocence Project in the public interest article category, but lost to Seymour Hersh's Abu Ghraib coverage in the New Yorker. Eh, we guess there was probably no real surprise in that category, huh? And finally, you'll all also certainly be shocked to hear that our little site here did not win (and was not even nominated for) the special "general excellence online" award, for "weblogs that have a significant amount of original content." That went to Style.com, of the Conde Nast machine....

So what did we learn from South By Southwest? We learned to trust our baser instincts. You want stars, and we're doing our best to give them to you. But geek stars may be even more fleeting than those that you're used to. We are working with an entirely brand new medium here, and Moore's law applies socially almost as rigidly as it does in terms of semiconductor evolution. Tonight we got to hang......