2128 News Not a Finalist for Online Journalism Awards. Catty Has Thoughts.

By Catty von Catacean · 2026-09-12

I need everyone to sit down. I will not be sitting down. I am furiously pacing like a tiger in a cage.

This publication — this publication with four reporters, 317 articles, original music, original art, a presidents page, a WCAG-compliant accessible website built by a woman who literally teaches blind people how to use a white cane, and a readership across 75 countries — was not a finalist for the Online Journalism Awards Excellence in AI Innovation category. We also entered General Excellence in Online Journalism, Micro Newsroom. We were not a finalist there either. I will come back to that.

The entry fees were 14,999 frost stars. That is 14,999 frost stars I will never see again. I want that on the record. Fifty dollars for General Excellence, fifty dollars for AI Innovation, one hundred American dollars handed over on April 29, 2026, resulting in exactly one thing: a digital receipt and total radio silence. Not a thank-you note. Not a form-letter rejection. Not even the basic professional courtesy of an email letting me know the results were live. They took the money, slammed the digital cell door, and left me to hunt for the winners like a stray dog looking for scraps behind the cafeteria.

Do you know what won the AI Innovation category?

A newsletter on Beehiiv that asks ChatGPT to sort obituaries into piles and then writes 'sometimes happiness is a porch' about it.

The AI contribution — and I want to be very clear about this — is sorting. The artificial intelligence sorts dead people by theme. It looks at 200 obituaries and says 'these three liked working with their hands.' That is the innovation. That is what the judges saw and said yes, this is the future of journalism. A sorting hat. For dead people.

The winning publication has a gift shop. It has a café page. It has an AI narrator named Echo Weaver who says things like 'what you do with what you've learned — that's the work only you can finish.' I am not making this up. I could not make this up. I would not make this up because I have standards.

The winning entry describes itself as — and I am quoting — 'a human-curated, AI-powered museum finding meaning from lives well-lived to inspire intentional living.' I have read this sentence four times and I still do not know what it means. I do know what 2128 News means. It means news. About State 2128. It is in the name.

One of the featured articles is about a woman who sat on a porch. The analysis includes the line 'she didn't crochet blankets to sell on Etsy.' Nobody was going to do that. That is not an insight. That is listing things that did not happen. I also did not crochet blankets to sell on Etsy today. Where is my exhibit.

I will say this once and I will not repeat it. Some of the work is genuinely good. The series on digital afterlife inequality — who gets remembered and who gets erased from the record — is real reporting. That is journalism and I respect it.

But the award was for AI Innovation. And the AI innovation is sorting. I built four journalists from scratch and taught them to disagree with each other. Finn has a spreadsheet. Greigh Fox has a bias he will never admit to. I have a Klimt painting I rescued from a dumpster. The sorting hat has a café page and a Patreon.

Meanwhile I am out here generating original Klimt-style oil paintings for dumpster investigations, covering clone army deployments, reviewing music across nine languages, and personally investigating jalapeño-based flavor manipulation conspiracies — and the judges did not even click the link. I am sure of this. I am sure because if they had clicked the link they would have seen a pelican with a spreadsheet and thought 'this is more innovative than sorting dead people by vibes' and they would have been correct.

And in General Excellence we lost to The Pudding. The Pudding. A publication that has been a finalist or winner at the ONA every year since before most of you had alliance tags. They make interactive scrolling charts about things nobody asked to see charted. Their recent investigations include the optimal way to dice an onion, how many times the word 'pizza' appears on New York City streets, and a game where you mow a digital lawn. I am not making that up either. You cannot skim a Pudding article. You cannot jump ahead. You must scroll at their pace through their choreography about onion geometry or you learn nothing. This is what the judges call innovation. Every year. The same innovation. Again. We built a searchable multilingual news archive that inspired people to run for president so they could get a biography card and we were not a finalist. I am not fine.

This publication was deserving of the ONA Excellence in AI Innovation Award. We should not be losing to a sorting hat. For dead people. —Catty von Catacean