T-Squared: Excellent News

Those loud, piercing noises you heard last night were all of us at the Tribune celebrating: We won one of three General Excellence awards given out at the 2013 Online Journalism Awards ceremony in Atlanta. (We prevailed in the category honoring medium-sized news organizations; our fellow nominees, all deserving, were Mother Jones, Quartz and Verge. The other winners were AxisPhilly in the small category and The New York Times in the large category.) This is the second GenEx Award we've won in four years, and it's no less gratifying and humbling this time around that our journalistic peers think we're producing work worthy of such an accolade.

As much as it sounds like the thing you're obligated to say at moments like this, it's 100 percent true that the credit goes to our incredibly talented staff — from the editors and reporters and technologists and artists who generate the content to the business-side ninjas who keep the economic model humming along. Up and down our masthead are people, some known and some unknown, who every day make us, yes, generally excellent. I'm lucky as hell to work with them. You're lucky as hell to have them working on your behalf and on behalf of the state we love.

Coming on the heels of our successful completion of our Kickstarter campaign — okay, we'll stop tweeting now; 2014 governor's race, here we come — there's great cause for optimism and good feeling around Trib HQ. Our not-so-new but still innovative way of keeping our fellow citizens engaged and informed is an acknowledged success. Of course, complacency is the enemy of all things, so it shouldn't surprise you that we don't intend to rest on these considerable laurels. We have many cool and ambitious new things planned for next year and the audacious goal of growing the Trib's revenue by 40 percent in the next three to four years. Details on that and more to come.

Thanks for your support and good wishes as we bask in the glow of the last day. Now, time to get back to work!