Is it time for a British Journalism Awards?

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.

Shortlists revealed for online categories in British Press Awards

The shortlist for the 2008 British Press Awards was released today. For the first time, the Awards included a new category of “digital journalist of the year” and a new “website of the year” award. Digital Journalist of the Year Sean Smith - The Guardian Toby Harnden - Daily Telegraph Daniel Finkelstein - The Times Declan Walsh - The Guardian Clancy [...]

Bloggers’ reaction to the British Press Awards

Here’s a shock: Some right-wing political bloggers have reacted badly to their journalistic bête noir, Polly Toynbee, collecting the gong for columnist of the year. on Monday night. For the Devil’s Kitchen, this was a sure sign that “everyone else in the MSM is even stupider than Polly herself”. He went on to claim: If we needed any [...]

PA trials new slideshow tool at Press Awards

Last night, Press Gazette reported the winners of the British Press Awards live on a dedicated blog (on Twitter). But the most exciting aspects of the project was our first public use of ShowBuilder, a new multimedia slideshow tool being developed by the Press Association and Vexed Digital. Using the tool, we created audio sideshows to embed [...]