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There aren't many things that can take the shine off journalism's most prestigious awards, but for two reporters, Monday's news must have been bittersweet. Both Natalie Caula Hauff, who won for the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier, and Rob Kuznia, from the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze, left the business after their work was published. Also, the Breeze winners didn't even know they were nominated for the prize.

Journalists are stepping up their complaints about restrictions on their access to policymakers, Paul Farhi writes in a story replete with "minders" and FOIA stonewalling: "Reporters have always wanted more information than government officials have been willing or able to give. But journalists say the lid has grown tighter under the Obama administration, whose chief executive promised in 2009 to bring 'an unprecedented level of openness' to the federal government."

The Newspaper Guild changed its name to NewsGuild, but that won't make web journalists sign up, Lydia DePillis writes. She cites two reasons: "One is the loss of leverage, with more aspiring journalists than there are jobs and an environment in which content is becoming increasingly commoditized. The other is a shift in identity, with a generation of younger workers less familiar with unions who’ve built personal brands that they can transfer to other media companies."

Alexis Sobel Fitts discusses why increasing numbers of news web sitesPacific Standard, the Huffington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times — are doing away with comments or making them less prominent: "When Popular Science did it first, in September 2013, the internet response was mostly negative or incredulous. But it’s becoming increasingly commonplace as more discussion gets outsourced to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other parts of the social Web."

Rolling Stone’s discredited campus rape story wins Error of the Year from Poynter's Craig Silverman in his annual roundup of the year's most notable media missteps and corrections: "It should go down as one of the most cautionary tales of confirmation bias in journalism. It’s also an example of how to not to behave when your organization publishes a disastrous piece of reporting." Silverman contrasts the Rolling Stone-walling with mea culpas from Deadspin and io9.

The House of Representatives may have passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill before adjourning, but it didn't get to vote on a Freedom of Information bill that passed the Senate by unanimous consent. Kelly J O'Brien reports that "an almost complete lack of interest from the major publications most likely to benefit from better freedom of information laws" was partly to blame. More from The Hill. Details from RCFP.

The retiring attorney general has prosecuted record numbers of people under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to the media. Kelly J. O'Brien writes that Eric Holder needs to do more than express regret: "The Obama administration has undoubtedly tilted the legal landscape against leakers and national security reporters. If Holder wants to change that, he will have to unpave a long road of specific policies laid down by the DOJ during his tenure,"

Multiple accusations of plagiarism by Fareed Zakaria haven't derailed his career, and David Uberti says that's because journalists aren't serious about the problem: "A review of examples from the past quarter-century shows that journalists have continuously grappled not only with the definition of plagiarism, but also how to respond to it. Punishment has been consistently inconsistent. And opinions vary on whether such sinners should be allowed back in the church."

Amid the remembrances of legendary editor Ben Bradlee, Carol Felsenthal writes about Howard Simons, who was the Washington Post's second-in-command during the Watergate era: "If Bradlee was the great man of Watergate, Simons, who died in 1989 at age 60, was the forgotten man, without whom Bradlee might never have been seen as so great," Felsenthal writes. "He had started at the Post in 1961 as a science writer, one of the subjects that particularly bored Bradlee."

The Richmond Standard, a news web site in Richmond, Calif., is "one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands," Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson writes. Then he explains: "That may be because it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240 billion oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire, spewing plumes of black smoke over the city and sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help."