The Online News Association in the US has announced the finalists for its Online News Awards 2009. For students of journalism, it’s well worth having a trawl through the (very long) list of categories to see what US professionals reckon to be some of the best online journalism projects around. Of particular interests to Centre for Journalism students will be the student journalism categories, which show the kind of projects that can be achieved both by individual journalists and by large teams of students.

I’ve by no means looked at all of them, but I particularly liked the University of California entry in the student journalism small team category (a cleverly-themed Flash presentation on the resurgence of B-Movie midnight screenings) and the City University of New York’s Election 2008 coverage in the large team category.

There are also examples of some far more expensive and ambitious pieces of work, such as the National Film Board of Canada’s massive Waterlife multimedia documentary, and the Seattle Times’s investigation into MRSA. Also well worth a look are the Chauncey Bailey Project, in which a team of journalists is carrying on the work of a black journalist gunned down in Oakland in 2007 because of the stories he was working on, and the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation into tobacco smuggling.

All food for thought when it comes to planning third-year projects.