Time Magazine names its top 25 blogs for 2009 including Talking Points Memo, The Huffington Post, Lifehacker, MetaFilter and The Daily Dish. The most overrated blogs of the year, according to Time: TechCrunch, Gawker, Jim Kramer, PerezHilton and Daily Kos.

Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab picks the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008. The top 5 are 1. New York Times, 2. USA Today, 3. Washington Post, 4. Los Angeles Times and 5. Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of top newspaper sites, Politico, the two-year-old Washington D.C. Internet newspaper, made it to no. 11 on Neiman’s list despite being a relative newcomer by following a well-honed strategy of being fast and first with political news with an edge. That strategy is set down in an internal memo that came to light in Gabriel Sherman’s profile of Politico for The New Republic called The Scoop Factory. The memo’s noteworthy because it spells out the site’s criteria for a good story. It’s also an excellent blueprint for any website or individual blogger that wants to distinguish themselves from the pack and rack up page views in the process. Definitely a must read.

Chicago Public Radio’s Alex Blumberg and National Public Radio’s Adam Davidson won a 2008 Polk Award – one of the country’s top journalism honors – for their mortgage crisis report called The Giant Pool of Money on This American Life. I finally broke down and got an MP3 player just so I could listen to this story.

People like free stuff, especially when it comes to online news. But there are some things they’re willing to pay for. According to Slate’s Jack Shafer, people will patronize paid sites under certain conditions, if they are: “1) so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) stupendously authoritative.” His examples: ConsumerReports.org, MLB.TV and Apple’s iTunes store.

The future of journalism is the topic of the NVision 2009 conference to be held March 30 at the Newseum in Washington D.C. “Journalism Jobs in Transition” will feature top journalists and media managers including Politico Editor John Harris, NPR President Vivian Schiller and Mara Schiavocampo, digital correspondent for NBC Nightly News. The conference is cosponsored by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the Online News Association. Registration is $45 for members and $75 for non-members or sign up by March 6 and pay $65. Get an ONA promotion code on the ONA Discounts page or visit NewsVision.org to register.

It’s not easy. But it is possible, as a handful of writers have shown, including some with no previous business reporting experience.

I’ve written before about not needing to be serious to write about serious topics, like the hip hop YouTube video that humorously but succinctly explained the Large Hadron Collider.

Lately, the piece on the financial crisis that I keep hearing people talk about for its elegantly simple take on the whole mess is one that first aired last May on the radio show This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. Alex Blumberg, a producer at This American Life, and Adam Davidson, a National Public Radio business reporter, got together to explain the connection between fancy new forms of debt like collateralized debt obligations and people losing their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages.

It was an instant, and timely, hit. The New York Times has written about the story and the pair, who now have a blog and podcast devoted to writing about the crisis called Planet Money.

Making it easy for readers to understand hard stuff is the kind of thing that’s taught in Journalism 101. But after spending years on a beat you sometimes lose sight of who your readers are and what their grasp of the information is, or isn’t. Roy Peter Clark, a writing instructor with the Poynter Institute, reminded writers of that point in his Writing Tools column this week. He also referred to a column he penned back in 2001 explaining how to make stories on even the driest or most complex subjects “engaging and comprehensive.” Some of his advice:

Tell it to a friend. When you tell your story to a single person, your voice changes and your language becomes more simple and direct.

Think graphics. Informational graphics are reaching new levels of excellence in American newspapers. Our ability to explain complex issues in words and then illustrate them in pictures provides valuable reinforcement for the reader.

Read the entire column here.