Last night, I had the pleasure of joining my old colleagues from NPR at the Online Journalism Association’s award ceremony in DC. First of all, it was great to see the gang again after three weeks as a non-NPR employee. It was also great to see NPR nominated for a wide range of awards (eight in total). The highlights for me, however, were that the NPR API won its first award (explicitly) and the fact that Kinsey Wilson won the Rich Jaroslovsky award (congratulations, Kinsey!).

The NPR API won the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism, which is a huge honor! I couldn’t be more proud of the NPR team, and more specifically the NPR Digital Media Tech Team, in claiming this. The work that the team did is amazing and it is great to see that work getting recognized in such a prestigious fashion. I am also very thankful that Kinsey invited me to accept the award on behalf of NPR. Representing such a tremendous team in this forum is a huge honor for me. While accepting the award, I explicitly thanked Zach Brand and Harold Neal as my “partners in crime” in getting the API live. While I stand by that statement, I do wish I explicitly thanked the rest of the Tech Team who has played a very important role in the evolution of the API since its launch in 2008.

Congratulations to Demian Perry, Jeremy Pennycook, Jennifer Oh and the other contributors to NPR Mobile as well, for winning the award for Outstanding Use of Emerging Technologies.

I look forward to seeing more great achievements from NPR going forward. I expect that there will be many…