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The Irish on-line IT and telecoms news service has been nominated in the Technology category of the 2002 awards for its series of articles aimed at demystifying wireless technologies. The site is the only Irish on-line media outlet shortlisted for an award.
Last year ElectricNews.Net took the top prize in the Multimedia category for its work in delivering news and alerts across multiple platforms including Web, e-mail, WAP and audio.
In the Technology category ElectricNews.Net will be going up against BBC News Online's science and technology team for its articles "Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking" and "Village in the Clouds embraces computers."
The awards, which are now in their fourth year, have 17 categories covering areas such as best news story, best news design and navigation and best overall journalism service. Companies nominated for awards include Guardian Unlimited, the Scotsman, Spain Espiral and Newscientist.com. The awards ceremony takes place in London on 4 July.
The on-line media sector did not escape the dot.com bomb phenomenon that it widely reported on, and many news sites and services have either gone out of business or scaled back their services over the last 18 months.
Milverton Wallace, founder and organiser of the European Online Journalism Awards, said that the last year had been "very tough" for the on-line media sector. "Despite sites like The New York Times doing well there is a lot of depression around. There is no real investment in the sector and the digital media area has been painted with the same brush as the main technology market," commented Wallace.
Several sites such as The Irish Times' ireland.com and FT.com have reacted to the changes in the sector by charging for access to certain elements of their content as revenues from on-line advertising dried up.
Wallace said that such a strategy was risky unless the service offered was in a specialised field. "A recent study showed that conversion rates of customers when sites changed from free to fee-based was just 2.3 percent. It is unlikely that general content sites will survive charging for content, but sites that concentrate on certain areas will have a better chance," he remarked.
However, despite all the upheavals, the 2002 European Online Journalism Awards did manage to more than double its number of entries from last year to over 780.
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