/ 6 August 2010

Prizes galore

Over its 25-year history, the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> and its staff and contributors have won many, many awards.

Over its 25-year history, the M&G and its staff and contributors have won many, many awards. They include:

  • The International Press Directory awarded the M&G the prize for Best International Newspaper in 1995.
  • The paper’s fledgling website won a Loerie award in 1997.
  • M&G reporters Wally Mbhele and Mungo Soggot won the Foreign Correspondents’ Association Press Award in 1998 for their reporting on the Central Energy Fund scandal and other “shenanigans in the corridors of power”. Plaques were presented to them by Nelson Mandela.
  • In 1999, then-editor Phillip van Niekerk won an Achiever of the Year Award from the Institute for Management Consultants. “There is no greater tribute than to be described as the ‘Conscience of the Nation’, an accolade that the M&G has truly earned over the past year,” said the institute’s president, Angelo Kehayas. In the same year, sports writer Andy Capostagno won a South African Breweries Sports Journalist of the Year award and Environmental reporter Fiona Macleod won an NSPCA print media award for service to animals.
  • In 2001, photographer Ruth Motau won an SABC award for women who made a difference in media.
  • In 2002, Khadija Magardie was a CNN African Journalist of the Year (newsprint category); and reporters Stefaans Brümmer and Thebe Mabanga and columnist John Matshikiza each grabbed a Vodacom Journalist of the Year award (Mabanga got the Editor’s Choice prize).
  • In 2003, Sam Sole was the overall winner in the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Award for his exposé of the arms deal. Wisani wa ka Ngobeni won in the print-news category of the 2003 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards (northern/southern region) for his story about Mosiuoa Lekota’s hidden business interests.
  • In 2004, Brümmer and Sole won first prize in the Mondi Paper Newspaper Awards (investigative-journalism category), and Ngobeni and Matuma Letsoalo were awarded the MKO Abiola Print Journalist Award in the CNN African Journalist of the Year awards. Editor Ferial Haffajee was named Shoprite Checkers/SABC2 Woman of the Year (media category).
  • Sole, Brümmer, Zukile Majova and Nic Dawes (along with Business Day‘s Rob Rose) won the 2006 Mondi Shanduka Story of the Year for their coverage of the links between Brett Kebble and Jackie Selebi. The judges said their work “scrupulously unravelled … the unsavoury links between money and politics more generally”. Editor Haff ajee was given the 2006 MTN Women in the Media Award.
  • The Thomas Pringle Award has been won, over the years, by staffers and M&G writers Gus Silber, Charlotte Bauer, Bafana Khumalo, Robert Kirby and Shaun de Waal (twice).
  • The paper got the Joel Mervis award for ‘typographical excellence” in 2003, 2006 and 2007.