The Electronic Mail & Guardian, the daily online sister to the print edition, won a Loerie design award for best Internet news site, beating almost 100 rivals. eM&G editor Irwin Manoim became the first journalist in the history of the Loeries to win the advertising industry’s most prestigious award.
Antjie Krog was the joint recipient of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association award for outstanding journalism for her coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which appeared in the Mail & Guardian. Krog, a staffer at the SABC, shared the prize with Financial Mail writer Justice Malala.
Arts editor Shaun de Waal won the Thomas Pringle Award in the review category for his literary journalism.
Deputy arts editor Janet Smith won the Maskew Miller Longman Young Africa Award for One Bounce, a youth novel she wrote with educational radio producer Andrew Ntsele.
Freelance journalist Justin Arenstein was awarded the Ruth First Award for courageous journalism for his reporting on the Dolphin story and the fake driving licence scandal in Mpumalanga. He was also named a runner-up for the Pringle Award, for “facing up to the news implications of the new Constitution”.
Freelance classical music writer Bongani Ndodana won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Music.
A collection of David Beresford’s popular Dear Walter columns, entitled The Dear Walter Papers, was published by the M&G this year and found itself in the Exclusive Books Top 10 non-fiction charts, where it remained for several months. The book was the subject of further talk because it used the president’s coat of arms, which is copyrighted but has yet to be put into the Constitution. Beresford is the M&G’s associate editor and The Guardian’s South Africa correspondent.
Chief photographer Ruth Motau received the Freedom Forum Fellowship from Rhodes University and exhibited her work at the Macufe Festival in Bloemfontein.
M&G-TV had another stunning year, garnering one of the world’s most prestigious TV awards, the Recontres Nord Sud in Geneva, for episode three of Ghetto Diaries. In Across the Divide, a mineworker and his wife corresponded via Hi-8 video camera. Directed by Khulane Msizi, it was named best television film, and SABC1 was honoured for flighting the series.
A new edition of How Can Man Die Better, Benjamin Pogrund’s biography of Robert Sobukwe, was published. Pogrund, who ran training programmes this year for the M&G, is now in Israel setting up an institution to run programmes to promote peace.
Writer Eddie Koch and chief sub-editor Fiona Macleod were finalists in the WWF/Green Trust competition for Open Africa, an M&G environmental supplement, for the second year running.