Tom Harper (newspaper, 2006) won young journalist of the year at the British Press Awards 2009.
Harper, a reporter for the Mail on Sunday, won £5,000 as part of the prize. The judges described him as “a story-setter in the true sense of old fashioned reporting”.
Decca Aitkenhead (newspaper, 1995) was named Interviewer of the Year, scooping the prize for a piece on Alistair Darling published in the Guardian in August 2008. It was described as “an agenda-setter” which “threw Downing Street into chaos, knocked millions off the stock market and set the tone for the rest of the year’s economic news”.
Stephen Foley (newspaper, 1999) won the Business and Finance Journalist of the Year award. He received special praise for his reporting and analysis, and ability to make finance more accessible to the general reader.
Three City alumni have been shortlisted for the British Press Awards 2010. Ian Birrell (newspaper, 1985) is up for the Columnist of the Year award for his column in The Independent. John Arlidge (newspaper, 1991) has been nominated for Feature Writer of the Year for his work for The Sunday Times and Jon Swaine (newspaper, 2007) has been put forward for his work as a reporter at The Daily Telegraph.
Last year’s magazine students were highly commended for their real-life magazine Tell! in the 2009 PTC Magazine Academy awards.
Editor Chris Hall said: “We were all very pleased with what we’d created but weren’t sure that the judges would fully get it, as it was a bit of an unusual idea. On the other hand, who wouldn’t want a magazine that had clowns, astronauts, house boats, bog snorkeling, naked clubbing and jelly sculpture all in the same issue?.”
Hall, who now works for the Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine, also won a highly commended award for a magazine concept that he and fellow students developed in the first term.
The PTC’s New Journalist Awards 2009 also brought success for City magazine MA grads. Gabrielle Jaffe (magazine, 2009) won Most Promising Student and Katie Jacobs (magazine, 2009) was highly commended in the same category.
The Guardian feature writer and columnist Gary Younge (newspaper, 1993) won the James Cameron Memorial Award in October 2009.
He was awarded the prize for his reporting during the American presidential election.
Younge, who is based in New York, took a personal angle in his reporting of the election, recording the views of various communities and people at the prospect of a black president.
The prize, hosted annually by City University, is bestowed to journalists who have “combined moral vision and professional integrity”, and is given in memory of the renowned foreign correspondent and author, James Cameron, who died in 1985.
High praise for Heather Brooke in MPs’ expenses scandal
Honorary Visiting Fellow Heather Brooke was named Political Reformer of the Year 2009 by think tank Reform. She was awarded the title for her leading role in the MPs’ expenses saga.
Brooke waged a five year campaign for the full disclosure of MPs’ expenses. She first requested details of MPs’ expenses in October 2004 through a House of Commons freedom of information request. After this was denied she tried again until the High Court ruled that the details be made public in May 2008. This ruling was the driving force behind the resulting reform of the parliamentary expense system.
The details were subsequently revealed in a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph published from May 2009. Ms Brooke said of the scandal and her reasons for pursuing her FOI requests: “Anyone making a claim on the public purse must be prepared to put forward their receipts to justify their expenses and to make those receipts public.”
Brooke’s contribution was also acknowledged at the British Press Awards 2010, where she received a specially created award.
Merja Myllylahti – Best Paper
Merja Myllylahti (electronic publishing, 2008) won “best paper” at the International Symposium for Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, in April last year, for work completed as part of her MA project.
The paper, co-written with City academic Neil Thurman, analyses changes that have taken place at Finnish newspaper Taloussanomat since it stopped printing in 2007 to become Europe’s first online only newspaper.
Myllylahti’s work has been covered by publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and The Independent.
This is the second consecutive year that the prize has gone to a City electronic publishing student.
Annabel Symington (international, 2009) was awarded the John Ivinson Memorial Prize for Freedom of Expression at the annual World Press Freedom Day Student Journalism Competition.
Symington was awarded the prize for her article on the press coverage of the fighting in Gaza last year, after she spent several weeks there at the beginning of the conflict.
She said: “I won the prize for a piece I wrote about a topic that I felt was being ignored by the mainstream media. It was a huge honour to have an article that I felt so strongly about recognised and applauded by UNESCO.”
Etan Smallman (newspaper, 2009) beat 80 bloggers from around Europe to win the TH!NK About It blogging competition last year.
Smallman’s blog featured political campaigning in the UK ahead of the European MEP elections, and he was awarded a Mac laptop for winning the competition.
He said: “It was particularly gratifying that the British bloggers as a group did so well, considering that the UK is usually thought to be apathetic and ignorant about European politics.”
Blogs written by Kat Bishop and David Christopher (newspaper, 2009) were also rated highly for quality and the pair won iPhones for their work.
All of the TH!INK About It bloggers had to submit one post a month to the site, commenting on European politics.
BSME awards 2009
City University alumni swept the board at last year’s British Society of Magazine Editors awards (BSMEs), with three Editor of the Year wins.
Empire editor Mark Dinning (BA journalism, 1999) won the category of Best Entertainment and Celebrity Magazine. Editor of Money Week, John Stepek (periodical, 2003), won the Fiona Macpherson New Editor of the Year award, and editor of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Ed Grenby (periodical, 1998), won the Lifestyle Magazines category.
Channel 4 newsreader and reporter Samira Ahmed (newspaper, 1990) won Stonewall’s Broadcast of the Year award for her report “Corrective Rape in South Africa”.
The awards, from lesbian, gay and bisexual charity Stonewall, celebrate those who have made a positive impact on the lives of LGBT people each year. The report followed the rape and murder of South African female football star Eudy Simelane.
Tania Hershman (periodical, 1994) was commended in the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her book The White Road and Other Stories is her first collection of short stories and includes original fiction as well as stories based on articles she wrote for the New Scientist.
Last year Hershman was also highly commended for both Biscuit Publishing’s 2009 Flash Fiction competition and Aesthetica Creative Works competition 2009. She was also nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize and won both the Binnacle Ultra Short competition and the Total Beast Six-Minute Play Competition.
by Becky Seales, Jasmine Phillips, Jessica Baron, and Alex Saggers