Lilian Anekwe of the medical B2B magazine Pulse, beat the New Statesman’s political editor Martin Bright to be named the Magazine Journalism Awards’ news reporter of the year.
Anekwe impressed the judges with her story in May which revealed massive new Government investment in psychotherapy treatments. The judges said she ‘consistently breaks stories of national importance.’
She said: ‘I was very surprised to win, the competition was really high. For a B2B magazine like ours, it’s great for us to get the recognition.”
Interviewer’s gift
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Rachel Cooke of the The Observer Magazine, picked up the award for interviewer of the year. Cooke won in the same category in Press Gazette’s British Press Awards 2006.
In their citation, the judges said Cooke had ‘the interviewer’s great gift of making every subject sound like an old friend’and praised her ‘funny copy about fascinating people”.
‘It’s really nice to win,’Cooke said. ‘I have been working really hard, so it’s great to get something back. You can never win too many things – maybe Roger [Alton, Observer editor] will now give me a rise.”
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Vikki Miller, from CMPi’s Building picked up the business reporter award. The judges said Miller ‘knows what matters to her audience, and she can get the stories to prove it”.
She said: ‘It’s great to get the recognition. I didn’t expect to win at all – you never know what to expect.”
Miller’s tip for aspiring business journalists is to ‘write for your audience and give them what they want to read.’She said that more financial training in journalism colleges would help reporters get to grips with business stories.
Ryan Gilbey of the New Statesman won best reviewer for a scathing review of Goodbye Bafana, a film about the life of Nelson Mandela. The judges said in their citation that Gilbey was a reviewer that film-makers should fear. ‘If you’ve made a lousy film, just hope he doesn’t see it,’they said.
In his review, Gilbey said: ‘Mandela is relegated to the sidelines of his own life in this cowardly biopic”.
Gilbey said: ‘I was just amazed. It was great for my mum, who really wanted me to win. The film lacked passion. You have to really like film to do this job and that’s why it was so bad. It did everything wrong, which is why it was quite easy to write about.”
Piers and Kate Moss
Former editor of the Daily Mirror and News of the World Piers Morgan won the prize for best columnist for his celebrity and showbiz column in The Mail on Sunday‘s Live magazine, though he was not there in person to pick up the award.
The judges especially enjoyed Morgan’s depiction of supermodel Kate Moss, whom he portrayed as a ‘stroppy, pinch-faced little coke-snorter from Croydon”.
Radio Times won in the best subbing team category, with judges describing it as a ‘staggeringly difficult’magazine to make. The judges said that the Radio Times team ‘works at the pace of a daily, but with the quality of a monthly publication”.
The journalism awards were judged by PMA Training director Keith Elliott, director of the Society of Editors Bob Satchwell, editor-in-chief of Cedar Publishing Lori Miles and publishing consultant Richard Davies.
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