The Tyee website was recently selected as a Webby Award official honoree, one of the longest running and most respected prizes in digital publishing.

The website, which was redesigned last summer by Vancouver's Biro Creative design team and implemented by Kineticode Inc., won the award in the best news website category, which judges entrants based on "excellence in content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall experience."

The Webby Awards have been selected annually since 1996 by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to honor, according to the Webby website, "excellence on the Internet including websites, interactive advertising, online film & video and mobile."

From the 8,000 website entries, the academy chooses five finalists and 10 official honorees in each of 70 categories. The finalists in the news website category are: BBC News, NPR, the New York Times, Salon.com and The Guardian. The Tyee shares official honoree status with CNBC.com, CNN.com, Digg.com, the New York Observer, Reuters, The Economist, The Huffington Post and Variety.com, among others.

The academy awards two prizes from the list of finalists, one chosen by the public and the other chosen by the 750 members of the academy.

The academy "is a global organization of industry experts and technology innovaters, such as David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Groening, Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser."

In 2009, The Tyee's political news blog The Hook was named a Webby Honoree in the category of Political Blog, sharing that distinction with entries by The Guardian, The BBC, The New Yorker, Salon.com, Time, CNN and several others.