Business Week and IEEE Spectrum Win PRSA 2006 Excellence in Technology Journalism Awards.

NEW YORK -- Brian Grow, Atlanta correspondent, and Ben Elgin, San Mateo (Calif.) correspondent, respectively, of Business Week magazine, and Erico Guizzo, associate editor, of IEEE Spectrum magazine, have won the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) 2006 Awards for Excellence in Technology Journalism.

The awards were presented on June 19 at a special ceremony in New York during the 2007 PRSA Technology Section Conference. The annual gathering, now in its 10th year, attracts public relations practitioners from corporations, nonprofits, governmental agencies and PR firms from around the country. 2007 marked the 10th year the Technology Journalism Awards have been presented, and the Conference is the 10th annual national technology conference held by PRSA's Technology Section. The awards competition, sponsored by PR Newswire, was judged by an independent panel of 27 peer editors, writers and reporters from the national general, business and trade press.

Mr. Grow's and Mr. Elgin's co-authored award-winning article, in the general business category, entitled, "Click Fraud - The Dark Side of Online Advertising," was published as Business Week's cover story for October 2, 2006. The story, based on intensive investigative reporting, concludes that many of Google's and Yahoo's online advertisements were actually read on dummy Web sites clicked on by thousands of people in "Paid to Read" click rings with no purchasing intentions from locations as distant as Botswana, Syria and Mongolia. In some cases, the authors found "clickbot" software was used to generate automatic, anonymous page hits for which advertisers were subsequently billed.

Online advertising consultants and academics interviewed by the authors estimated that 10 to 15 percent of ad clicks were fake, translating to about $1 billion in annual billings. The authors concluded that Google and Yahoo passively profit from click fraud, and even have an incentive to tolerate it. As a result of the article, both the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service have launched their own investigations after noticing cybercriminals discussing cyberfraud in various chatrooms. As one executive said in the article, "If this was costing Yahoo money instead of generating it, they would have stopped the practice long ago."

In the competition's trade/technical/professional category, Mr. Guizzo's award-winning article, "How Brazil Spun the Atom," published in IEEE Spectrum's March 2006 issue, explores that nation's uranium enrichment activities against the backdrop of Western concerns over Iran's aggressive posture in openly escalating its own enrichment program. Though Brazil has consistently remained in total compliance with IAEA inspection procedures and under democratic leadership since 1985, its reasons for enrichment and the secrecy surrounding its hardware have raised some questions in the nuclear community.

"This year's winners emerged from a tough competitive field of 89 entries for work published in 2006, and each winning entry appears to be the product of substantial investigative reporting," said Joel Strasser, APR, Fellow PRSA, who chairs the 2007 Awards committee and heads an independent technology communications firm in Brick, N.J. "Each of the two winning entries are exceptionally strong works that underscore great technology reportage and writing style. They follow a tradition of our other award winners on the basis of their value to readers, clarity of communications and significance in terms of technical innovation and newsworthiness."

Each winning entry received a cash prize award of $1,000 plus a pair of crystal award trophies presented to the winners as well as their publishers.

The awards were judged by a distinguished panel of 26 peer judges, all members of the national editorial community representing the types of journalism practiced by each of the winners. Judges for this year's competition were: Roger Allan, contributing editor, Electronic Design; Michael Brown, executive editor, Maximum PC; Richard Comerford, editor, Electronic Products; Rich Dzierwa, editor, Consumer Digest; Gregg Early, executive editor, KCI Communications; Nan Fornal, editor, The Home Entertainment Group; Mike Fratto, senior technology editor, Network Computing; Kate Greene, information technology editor, MIT Technology Review; Paul Guinnessy, online editor, Physics Today; Mark Hall, editor-at-large and columnist, Computerworld; Mike Haney, senior editor, Popular Science; Tom Hoffman, editor-at-large, Computerworld; Andrea Klee, editor, Electrical Contractor; Aaron Ladage, online editor, Land Line; Don Loepp, managing editor, Plastics News; Rebekkah Marshall, managing editor, Chemical Engineering; Nancy Michell, developmental editor, MSDN and TechNet; Jay Nelson, editor and publisher, Design Tools Monthly; Stephanie Overby, senior editor, CIO Magazine; Jan Ozer, contributing editor, PC/EventDV/ StreamingMedia.com; Alix Paultre, executive editor, special projects, Hearst Electronics Group; Cameron Sturdevant, West Coast technical director, eWEEK Labs; Nicholas Thompson, senior editor, Wired; Warren R. True, Ph.D., chief technology editor, Oil & Gas Journal; Debra Vogler, senior technology editor, Solid State Technology; and Joyce Ward, senior technical editor, editorial, Advance for Imaging & Radiation Therapy Professionals.

About the PRSA Technology Section

The PRSA Technology Section (www.prsa.org/Sections/tech) is an organization of communications professionals who develop, implement and counsel regarding public relations or marketing communications programs for technology companies, and practitioners who work at technology organizations or who use emerging technologies to conduct their routine business.

About PRSA

The Public Relations Society of America (www.prsa.org), headquartered in New York City, is the world's largest organization for public relations professionals with more than 31,000 professional and student members. PRSA is organized into 109 Chapters nationwide and 20 Professional Interest Sections and Affinity Groups, which represent business and industry, counseling firms, independent practitioners, military, government, associations, hospitals, schools, professional services firms and nonprofit organizations. The Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) has 285 Chapters at colleges and universities throughout the United States.