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.