Is it time for a British Journalism Awards?

Wednesday, 24 March 2010, 13:36

In the time I worked at Press Gazette — and indeed even before that — there were complaints like this one from Craig McGill’s blog about how the British Press Awards deal with digital journalism every single year.

We had plenty of good-faith internal debates on how to fix this and the organisers have come up with plenty of not-quite-right solutions.

How can there be a legitimate news website of the year award, for example, if the BBC or Sky can’t win it? Why should a reporter’s digital efforts have a special class of awards when there is barely any recognition for other specialist functions like subbing? Does shooting some video or running a really great blog really warrant an award separate from reporters or photographers working in print?

These questions are definitely being asked behind the scenes. And the sub-optimal outcomes are not, contrary to the common assumption in the media blogosphere, caused print dinosaurs resisting or resenting digital journalism.

There’s a bigger philosophical problem here about adapting media awards categories devised in a different age to the era of converged media.

What we really need is a medium-agnostic journalism awards rather than a “press” awards and a “television” awards and a “radio” awards, each with tokenistic “digital” gongs.

Entry Filed under: British Press Awards,Online