Orato.com Recognized As One Of Top News Sites In The World By Webby Awards

It’s a big day here in Oratoland. The Webby Awards, hailed by The New York Times as the “Oscars of the Internet”, has selected Orato as one of the top news sites on the planet.

We’re hanging out in pretty august company; also selected among 14 honorees in the news category were: CNBC.com. Reuters.com, ScientificAmerican.com, The Huffingtonpost.com, Guardian.co.uk and Slashdot.org. Of the 8000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15 per cent were recognized as honorees.

(By the way, the five nominated for this years News site Webby are: BBC, CNN, Discovery News, the New York Times and Wired.com, so we can’t feel too badly about being left off the nomination list. But we’re delusional enough to think we can win it all, and, with your help, we will…next year.)

What’s so great about all this is that Orato World HQ is a funky little operation run out of an old office building where the pipes clank and the washrooms feature one temperature out of the tap: cold. It ain’t 30 Rock. But what Orato has going for it is YOU, the citizen journalist. We’re zeroing in on 4,000 registered correspondents from every conceivable corner of the globe and you keep the site full of great stories in video, audio, text and image. Just to note a few recent posts:

The Worst Of Times, The Best Of Us: Virginia Tech One Year Later, a heartfelt story posted by a Virginia Tech student today, one years after the massacre that horrified the world.

Zimbabwe On The Brink, posted a few days ago by a young journalist from that country, who captures the sense of foreboding with his fellow citizens about the eventual outcome of the elections which have democratically ousted tyrant Robert Mugabe. The only problem is, Mugabe doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.

My Daughter Is Languishing In A Mexican Prison – is every mother’s worst nightmare. While her daughter Brenda Martin has almost given up hope of ever gaining her freedom, her mother, Marjorie Bletcher, reaches out to anyone who will listen: her daughter Brenda Martin has spent two years waiting to stand trial on a dubious fraud charge. Without bail, she shares a cell with 11 other women. Meanwhile, Canadian politicians vie fore photo opportunities, while Brenda watches her life go down the drain.

These are the pieces that make Orato one of the world’s top news sites. I’ll never get tired of saying it: Orato means I Speak. If you weren’t ready to tell your story before now, go ahead and post it, secure in the knowledge that you take second place to no one.