Yelvington Earns NAA Innovator Award

Congratulations to Steve Yelvington for being named 2007 Online Innovator of the Year by the Newspaper Association of America.

I like Steve’s visions of the evolution of media, I like that he still sees newspapers as the anchors of community and journalism. I’m still a big fan of newspapers, despite the industries overall disdain for most of the new media technologies to have come along so far. The only thing I find disappointing about his visions, is that there are so few sites that are implementing the strategies he often gets asked to talk about. Which is why I guess he wins the “Innovator” award and not the “Common Sense That Everyone’s Already Doing” award.

If you’d like to see what sort of community site a newspaper can become, visit BluffingtonToday.com, which now has regular readership levels higher than 60 percent in affluent Bluffton, S.C., and penetration as high as 90 percent when occasional readers are measured, according to Yelvington.