Journalists awarded for humanitarian reporting
KARACHI: The Centre for Excellence in Journalism at the Institute of Business Administration (CEJ-IBA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) presented the Humanitarian Reporting Award 2017 to six journalists on Friday.
Speaking on the occasion director CEJ Kamal Siddiqi shared details of CEJ’s collaboration with ICRC that began with two humanitarian reporting workshops and concluded with the awards. He said that CEJ and ICRC decided to hold these awards to acknowledge good journalism in humanitarian work.
Najum Abbasi, ICRC Pakistan’s communications coordinator, said “The collaboration with CEJ will continue in 2018 in an effort to continue inspiring and encouraging media to write, talk, and debate on humanitarian issues in an objective and non-partisan manner by keeping the interests of those affected by such issues at the heart of its reporting,” he said.
Speaking about the ‘Role of media in humanitarian crises’ senior journalist M. Ziauddin said that the creation of Pakistan had witnessed a massive bloodbath but there is not much written about it as far as journalistic reporting goes, although Saadat Hasan Manto has penned some good stories about the Partition days.
The awards were given in three categories: mainstream broadcast (Urdu), mainstream print and online (Urdu) and mainstream print and online (English) for news stories published between November 1, 2016 to Nov 9, 2017.
The winners and runners-up in the three categories were:
Mainstream broadcast (Urdu) Winner: Khawar Khan, Geo News (Story: ‘Medicines without cold chain management’)
Runner-up: Umar Farooq, Voice of America Urdu (Story: ‘Sikh bachon ka school kis mushkil se dochar hai’)
Mainstream print & online (Urdu)
Winner: Islam Gul Afridi, Akhbar-i-Khyber (Story:’ KP aur Fata mein AIDS ke mareezon ki tadaad mein izafa’)
Runner-up: Fariha Fatima, ARY News (Story: ‘Robin Hood Army’s fight against hunger’)
Mainstream print & online (English)
Winner: Shazia Hasan, Dawn Media group (Story: ‘The Ghosts of Gadani’)
Runner-up: Ghulam Dastageer, Herald magazine (Story:
‘Walking the line in times of conflict’).
Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2017