Winner: Victoria Cruz, a 17-year-old star of WNYC’s Radio Rookies, for a lovely piece about how she and her girlfriend became the first same-sex couple to be named “Best Couple” in her Bronx high school’s yearbooks.  The story, produced by Kaari Pitkin, edited by Marianne McCune, and broadcast on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, also brought Cruz the Hillman Foundation’s very first Sidney Award for an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism.

Winner:  Newsweek managing editor Dan Klaidman, for a superb cover story about Attorney General Eric Holder. Klaidman’s scoop–that Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate the torture abuses of the Bush administration–got all the attention, but the piece also offered splendid insights into all of the tensions between Holder’s Justice Department and Obama’s White House.

Sinner: Scott Shane, for the umpteenth piece about investigating torture in The New York Times which cast the debate purely in political terms and characterized Holder’s intention to appoint a prosecutor as one of “four fronts on which the intelligence apparatus is under siege”–without ever quoting any of the thousands of people who believe that such an investigation is a moral imperative. Shane also wrote that Holder “was close to assigning a prosecutor,” without giving any credit to Klaidman for breaking that story in Newsweek. Meanwhile, Shane’s erstwhile boss in the Washington Bureau, Sinner Doug Jehl, who led the battle inside the Times to prevent torture being described accurately as “torture,” has been chosen by Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli to be the Post’s new foreign editor.

Winner: Arianna Huffington for snatching up Winner Dan Froomkin, who was idiotically let go by The Washington Post last month, mostly because he had no “rabbi” at the Post–and none of the Post’s top editors appreciated the fact that he regularly broke important stories that the rest of the paper’s staff had ignored. Sinner Brian Stelter wrote a remarkably superficial piece in The New York Times about Froomkin’s move, which didn’t even manage to include a full description of Froomkin’s new responsibilities. Besides blogging twice a week for The Huffingon Post, Froomkin will oversee the site’s Washington coverage, supervising four reporters and an assistant editor.

Sinners: Touré, and all the other ahistorical commentators, who said that Michael Jackson was the first artist to get black and white audiences to worship the same music. That crucial crossover was achieved by Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Smoky Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and scores of other black artists of the 1960’s–all before the Jackson 5 released their first single. For one of a thousand examples, listen to this immortal cut from Marvin and Tammi.  [FCP contributor Gregory King points out that this trend actually started even earlier with Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Lena Horne.]

Winner:  The sublime Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, for managing to link Bob Dylan’s Sara with Alaska’s Sarah, in a piece that was as hilarious as it was substantive: “In Palin’s case, the government that she was declaring independence from is the one that she herself is governor of. She was therefore in the awkward position of having to argue that she has had “so much success in this first term” (e.g., “We took government out of the dairy business”) that “doing what’s best for Alaska” requires her to abandon her post.”  And Winner Frank Rich for reminding us why she remains formidable even though most people find her laughable: “she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.”

Sinners:  The op-ed editors of The New York Times, for asking disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to provide questions for Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing. Once upon a time, discredited former public officials were consigned to the obscurity they so richly deserve when they leave public office. Now they are brought back relentlessly by the MSM to provide “balance”–the way only wise old men like Karl Rove can. (Special thanks to FCP contributor SM.)