Tag Archives: Press Awards

Timetable for Press Awards announced

The Society of Editors has announced the timetable for the Press Awards.

The awards, which celebrate the best in British newspaper journalism in 2011, include the Cudlipp Award, organised by the British Journalism Review, which recognises excellence in popular journalism and the Journalists’ Charity’s special award.

In a release, the Society of Editors announced changes to the awards programme.

There will be 33 categories of awards, including the splitting up of categories covering features, columns and interviews to reflect the different styles in newspapers and team awards that will be the basis for voting for the Newspaper of the Year that will be chosen by a special panel on achievements during the year across all platforms – print and online.

Timetable

A list of categories and instructions will be the Press Awards site from 10 December, entries open on 4 January and close on 24 January 2012. Shortlists will be announced on 17 February  and the awards ceremony will be held on 20 March.

The Society of Editors also announced that the Regional Press Awards that it revived last year will be presented at a ceremony in London on 25 May. Full details will be announced in January.

TheMediaBriefing: You may not like it, but Mail Online is a digital innovator

Daily Mail website Mail Online took home the digital innovation award at last night’s Press Awards, much to the dismay of some. Is it innovative? Or just successful? Does it matter?

Media Briefing editor Patrick Smith stands firmly behind the award, and explains some of the reasons in an interesting post on the Media Briefing blog.

Soap stars on the beach isn’t Pulitzer prize-winning stuff, but the content from the paper is in the middle of the front page and you can click on that if you want too. There is genuine news here: the bank worker fired a Facebook post comparing here £7-an-hour wage to a boss’s £4,000-an-hour, for example, plus lots of middle market news mainstays you would expect such as tax and immigration. Mail execs reportedly claim only a quarter of traffic is driven by “showbiz” stories.

Alan Rusbridger on relationship with WikiLeaks: ‘things are quite difficult’

Last night Journalism.co.uk was at the Press Awards, where the Guardian was named Newspaper of the Year. At the ceremony the paper was praised specifically for its its coverage of the WikiLeak’s releases.

We caught up with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger at the end of the awards, who said that while the current situation with WikiLeaks is “difficult” there will be more revelations to come.

I think WikiLeaks was the stand out story, not only nationally but also globally. I think it had a global impact and I think it will be historically significant. I can’t think of another story in my lifetime where a story created by a newspaper has become the most discussed thing in every capital city around the world. That was the stand out story.

At the moment things are quite difficult between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, because they just are, partly due to the communications. It’s very difficult to keep relation with people if you never see them and the only way of communicating is through encrypted text messaging.

I think there will be more revelations to come and I think lots of papers are going to be developing their own mini versions of WikiLeaks. One thing WikiLeaks has taught us is the importance of working out how to get information securely and publish securely and I think that’s been a valuable lesson for us all.

You can see the full list of winners from the Press Awards here.

Follow the Press Awards tonight with Journalism.co.uk

Journalism.co.uk will be at the Press Awards from 7pm onwards and will endeavour to report the winners of each category live via Twitter from @journalism_live.

You can also follow a livestream of the event on the Press Awards website and keep up to date on Twitter by following the hashtag #pressawards.

More details on the shortlisted entries can be found at this link.