(continued)

Winner: Jon Perr, of crooksandliars.com, for demonstrating that a key Republican talking point after the Supreme Court's habeas corpus decision—that 30 former Guantanamo inmates have subsequently "taken part in anti-coalition militant activities"—is nothing more than an "urban myth."

Winner: The indispensable Sarah Lyall, for her brilliant profile of British television writer Russell T. Davies, the man who created Queer as Folk and then figured out that the venerable British sci-fi franchise Dr. Who was the best way to pursue his goal of promoting gay liberation on mainstream television.

Winners: The management of the Washington Post, which hosted an elegant farewell for the participants of its recent buyout program, unlike the ...

Sinners: New York Times, which marked the departure of 100 staffers with nothing at all.

Winner: Jonathan Capehart, for an excellent column explaining why Sam Nunn would be the worst possible choice for vice president by Barack Obama.

Winner: Ex–New York Times scribbler James Sterba, for this concise explanation of why the new two-page index of the New York Times is one of the worst ideas it has ever had:

I was against the removal of the period from The New York Times(.) on the masthead. I was against the removal of "Special to The New York Times" from under bylines. Those were, however, tiny and relatively innocent cosmetic alterations.

But what has been done to the first three inside pages of the first section is radical surgery. You have cut into the news hole and replaced it with eyeliner. Your new "Inside the Times" and "On NYTimes.com" amount to a gratuitous waste of space to ape the six o'clock TV news telling people what you are going to tell them later.

Please! All the information contained in these new features could be contained succinctly in a single column (agate type would be okay with me). These features have "graphics" written all over them. They suggest a graphics person created this airy, pleasing-to-the-eye format—which I find not pleasing at all. You know as well as I do that people become graphic artists instead of reporters because they prefer to look instead of read. They care what something looks like, not what it says.

We all hope that Internet surfers will eventually discover that thin, recycled blather is not a substitute for originally reported news. We also pray that when that time comes the great newspapers will not have dumbed themselves down so much that when readers wander off the Internet desert, they find something original to read and not just nice-looking graphics.

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