(c) Mary Turner, Amnesty Media Award Winner 2012

Entries are now invited for the Amnesty International Media Awards 2013. The Awards invite submissions from exceptional human rights journalists, film makers and photographers whose work has been broadcast or published in the UK between March 1 2012 and February 28 2013.

The closing date for entries is March 1 2013. There is a reduced entry fee for those received before midnight on February 1.

About the Awards

The Amnesty International Media Awards were established in 1992 to recognise and celebrate the best in human rights journalism.

These awards recognise the breadth and quality of human rights reporting across the media. Over the past two decades the awards have grown in prestige, recognising excellence in human rights reporting and acknowledging journalism’s significant contribution to the public awareness of human rights issues.

“An Amnesty award is a special honour, because it’s not only an acknowledgement of one’s journalism, but a way of upholding deeper principles. Freedom of expression is at the centre of Amnesty’s values, and it’s the essence of what we’re about as journalists.” Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News (winner TV Documentary 1997, TV News 2004)

The 11 categories recognise newspaper, magazine, radio, TV, digital and student journalism. Each is judged by an independent panel.

Award Categories:

Digital Innovation

Television news

Documentary

Radio

International television and radio

National newspapers

Magazines

Nations and regions

Photojournalism

Gaby Rado memorial award for up and coming human rights journalists

Student

Sponsorship

To encourage a wide range of award entries, Amnesty International has established a sponsorship fund to support a limited number of entries from freelance journalists and filmmakers as well as small digital and broadcast outlets.

Enter at www.amnesty.org.uk/awards

"I think I did more good as a war correspondent than I ever did as a serviceman," Waters said last week. "Besides all the things I covered, as a war correspondent I got the ear of the four-star general. I could openly question his methods and strategies, and that influenced the treatment and handling of troops."

"I was doing what I loved to do, what I was always proud to do,

"I have loved every day and every assignment… I have somehow realized all of my childhood dreams. Can’t beat that." link

The 81 year old is hoping to attend a World War II veterans day for the Emerald Coast Honor Flight in Washinton D.C. on April 29. Waters was wounded five times while photographing military operations. He was one of six photojournalists inducted into the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame in 2008.

Lasantha Wickrematunge, the editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper in Sri Lanka who was assassinated in January 2009, has been named laureate of the 2009 UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize,

“Jury members were moved to an almost unanimous choice by a man who was clearly conscious of the dangers he faced but nevertheless chose to speak out, even beyond his grave,” said Joe Thloloe, President of the jury and Press Ombudsman of the Press Council of South Africa, referring to the laureate’s posthumous editorial in which he voiced his commitment for press freedom at the risk of his life. “Lasantha Wickrematunge continues to inspire journalists around the world,” added Mr Thloloe. link

Journalists have fled Sri Lanka in recent months after an increasing number of attacks on media personnel and offices.

Photograph from Reuters/Guardian via Media Notes

Dan McDougall, a freelance foreign correspondent with The Observer newspaper among others, has been named as foreign reporter of the year at the British Press Awards 2009 being held tonight in London. Dan was shortlisted for the award in 2008, but has triumphed tonight. The Guardian’s Oliver Luft is at the event,

10.25pm: They’re all making speeches now. Foreign reporter of the year goes to Dan McDougall, freelancer for News of the World, Observer, Mail on Sunday Live Magazine. Wearing the first kilt to grace the awards. Bold stuff man. link

During 2008, Dan reported on the trafficking of football players from Ghana and the Ivory Coast to play for AC Milan or Paris St-Germain, how rising sea levels threaten to flood many of the islands in the fertile Ganges delta, as well as reports from on the Primark workers in India, soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the race to save the apes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Well done Dan.

Jonathan Miller writes about the "secret weapon" of television news on the Channel 4 World News blog. He’s talking about the fixers he’s worked with in the DRC, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Pakistan, Serbia and Sudan. "When fixers deliver," Miller says, "We make good telly,"

Fixers are all-too-often the unsung heros of our business. They work long hours in sometimes dangerous places. They take risks simply doing what they do. At times, they’re tainted by association with us and have to live with the consequences – long after the foreign journalists they’d been working with have gone.

At times, for example in Zimbabwe, they work with us undercover. If they’re caught, as one of my ITV colleagues pointed out during last night’s awards ceremony, there’s no friendly foreign embassy to bail them out. We pay our fixers well – but I’ve never met one who was only in it for the money. link via @worldnewsblog

This week the Channel 4 team won the award for best International News Coverage at the Royal Television Society awards this week for its reporting of the crisis in the DRC. An award, Miller says, that would not have been possible without the help of the team’s fixer, Robert Chamwami. The Frontline Fixer’s Fund, see the video above, was set up to help the families of those fixers who are killed doing their job.

The Kenji Nagai Award for Journalism was announced at the Burma Media Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand this week. The Burma Media Association created the award to honour the Japanese video journalist who was killed on the streets of Rangoon by a Burmese soldier during the saffron revolution of September, 2007. The inaugral award goes to imprisoned reporter Eint Khaing Oo, who reported the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in May, 2008 for the Eco-vision journal,

She was arrested on June 10 last year while covering a peaceful rally by Nargis victims. Police accused her of taking photos of the victims with the intention of sending those pictures to foreign media.

Eint Khaing was charged with committing a crime against public tranquility and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. According to her lawyer, Khin Maung Shein, she was merely doing her job. The news she reported was based on trustworthy sources and she did not send false news reports to other agencies. She is now in the notorious Insein Prison. link

Photograph of Eint Khaing Oo taken from Reporters without borders.

Two New York Times correspondents will share the
George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Husband-and-wife team Barry
Bearak and Celia W. Dugger… risked their freedom and their lives in Zimbabwe to
expose the violence that shook that country in the wake of disputed
elections as the corrupt government of President Robert Mugabe clung to
power.

Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune will receive the
George Polk Award for International Reporting for uncovering the rarely
publicized but more controversial aspects of America’s war on terror in
the Horn of Africa… In three reports from remote and lawless regions, he
described the beleaguered efforts of the United States military to
pre-empt an anticipated surge of radical Islamist activity. link

The Polk Awards will be presented at The Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on April 16, 2009. Editor & Publisher has a full list of award winners.

An undercover film shot in Zimbabwe by Shepherd Yuda, a prison officer, and smuggled out of the country has won the best news programme category in the Broadcast Awards announced last night. The film followed the story of vote rigging during the 2008 election,

Zimbabwe: The Stolen Ballots, a world exclusive broken on the guardian.co.uk website in July last year and also broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight, showed a Mugabe supporter getting prison officers to fill in their postal ballots in his presence.
The film was shot in Zimbabwe capital Harare’s central jail by prison officer Shepherd Yuda and smuggled out of the country by him. Yuda later fled the country with his family.
This is believed to be the first time a UK newspaper has won a Broadcast award. link

“We continue to keep an eye on the changing media scene and try to make appropriate adjustments as we go along,” he told AFP.
“There’s an evolutionary aspect to the Pulitzer Prizes going back through history,” Gissler said. “We added photography in 1943, for example, and we added explanatory journalism, and we started allowing online content as early as 1999.” link

The Pulitzers are U.S. only and will only consider publications that publish at least weekly and are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories.” The deadline for 2009 competition entries is February 1.

Ricardo Gonzalez Alfonso has won Reporters Without Borders Journalist of the Year award for “helping an independent press to survive in Cuba”,

After daring to challenge to the stateâ€s monopoly of news and information, González was arrested on 18 March 2003 along with 26 other dissident journalists during the crackdown known as the “Black Spring.” Accused of being “in the pay of the United States” and “undermining Cubaâ€s independence and territorial integrity,” he was given a 20-year prison sentence. He has been held in Havanaâ€s Combinado del Este prison since late 2004, despite poor health. link

The 2008 Media prize goes to the Seoul-based Radio Free NKâ€s North Korean journalists “in order to pay tribute to their courage and determination”. Burmese bloggers Zarganar and Nay Phone Latt, are joint winners in the “Cyber-dissident” category. Zarganar, known as the “Burmese Charlie Chaplin”, denounced the junta on his blog until his arrest in June 2008. Nay Phone Lat, who has featured on this blog many times, was sentenced last month to 20 years and six months. He blogged during the Sapphron Revolution in September 2008.