One of the best reporters I ever knew, the late Jeff Cole, had what I always considered the ultimate definition of his craft: "find stuff out, and put it in the paper." After spending the last couple of days judging the Online Journalism Awards, the top honours in the field, I can only think to myself ah, but if it were only so simple!

There has always been a large dimension of journalism that involves not just finding stuff out, but crafting it into a compelling story. The tools of the trade, though, were pretty simple, and didn't change much for many decades – pen, paper, camera, tape-recorder and, depending on the epoch, typewriter or personal computer.

These days, the "finding stuff out" part is greatly facilitated by the internet, and greatly augmented by the growing involvement of what media pundit Jeff Jarvis refers to as the "people formerly known as the audience." The "putting it in the paper" part, meanwhile, has morphed into "putting it on the internet" – and it's never been more complex.

I participate in the Online News Association's awards judging in part because it's a good window into best practices in the field, and it's great to see all the creativity. Beautiful interactive graphics and database-driven resources that enable the reader (viewer? consumer? audience? community?) to explore issues of technical, societal, geographic or emotional complexity. Multimedia storytelling that integrates text, audio, video, graphics and still images in all kinds of unique ways. New approaches to news that aren't limited by the cycle of a distribution medium – the paper every morning, the broadcast every evening – or by the one-way nature of traditional media.

As we feel our way in this new world, it's very hard to judge sometimes where to put the emphasis, and the resources. To begin with, should narrative storytelling itself even be at the centre of the journalistic enterprise in the age of Twitter and Facebook and all manner of "citizen journalism?" Is it worth the time and money to build that fancy Flash graphic? Will people really use that interactive timeline, or watch that narrated slideshow – or more to the point, will these new storytelling techniques engage people who wouldn't otherwise care?

Is online video going to be central to all journalism, or will we look back on some current efforts as the equivalent of the movie pioneers' filming of stage plays? How should we think about – and manage and facilitate - community involvement at every stage of the process?

The traditionalist in me tends towards the view that any great story can be told in any number of ways, and if it's skillfully done the means of the telling don't matter all that much. A simple still photograph, or artfully written narrative, can have all the information and emotional power you would ever want, so why fuss with the Google mash-ups?

At the same time, it's obvious in looking at dozens of top news websites and technologically inventive stories that this view is, well, mere traditionalism. If you can offer access to the source material in an easy-to-use fashion, that's obviously going to add a lot in many situations. Video, done well, can have extraordinary impact beyond what you can do with the written word; our addiction to TV didn't come about because people decided they didn't want to read anymore (though the reverse may be true).

As a publisher, I couldn't help but think about money as I weighed the award-worthy. That's a beautiful package, I'd think to myself as I considered something with all the multimedia bells and whistles, but it must have cost a fortune, what with all the technical and artistic horsepower required. We certainly can't afford a lot of these kinds of things at NewWest.Net, and the truth is that a lot of good-sized news organizations can't really afford them either. The cost may be dropping as the technology gets cheaper and practitioners get more adept, but it's not dropping as fast as newspaper revenues.

As an editor, I consider sorting all of this out to be the great challenge of the moment. Deciding how to approach a given story, shaping it for maximum accuracy, utility, and impact, publishing it at the right time, in the right medium and in the right context, and handling the often-tricky interactions among everyone involved – those are the things that good editors have always done. These days, all of these activities have a lot more dimensions, which is both fun and frightening. Give us a few decades, and we'll figure it all out.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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