The star of the British Press Awards was a former journalist who wasn’t in line to win anything – Boris Johnson.
Boris surrenders
His extended gag with its nicely judged under-lying barb and genuflection to the Daily Telegraph would have taken first prize in any political stand-up competition.
On behalf of all British politicians, the Mayor of London Boris offered the instruments of surrender.
“You have won... you have abolished our second home allowances, you have confiscated our porn videos and made it unacceptable for us to charge the taxpayer for something as straightforward as pruning wisteria,” said Boris, who also happens to be a Daily Telegraph columnist.
The former Spectator editor added for good measure that “broke, broken, brokeback Britain” could wait no longer for “the transfusion of probity” that journalists would bring.
The main awards were totally predictable.
Even a blind beggar with a wooden leg, as Robert Maxwell would have put it, could have worked out that the Daily Telegraph would scoop up all the premier awards for its inspired, and magnificently sustained coverage of the Parliamentary expenses scandal.
SunTalk
But a long way down the awards batting order, and miles away from endeavours of historic proportions, interesting things were going on.
Just in case you didn’t read the small print of the awards, Sun columnist Jon Gaunt picked up the Digital Innovation gong for SunTalk, the paper’s internet radio station, featuring top presenter Jon Gaunt.
It was a perfectly respectable winner. Internet radio is not exactly a new phenomenon, but the Sun has been the first national newspaper to seize fully the opportunity.
For the Sun and Gaunt, online offered heaven-sent freedom from the clutches of Ofcom, the communications regulator, and the somewhat rigid rules on impartiality that it imposes on its conventional radio licensees.
Gaunt doesn’t always do impartiality.
When Conservative leader David Cameron appeared on SunTalk, Gaunt briskly demanded to know: “What are you going to do about the million illegals here?”
Ironically, the famously outspoken Gaunt was created as a national figure by an awards ceremony - the Sony radio awards.
In 2001, Gaunt, then working for BBC Three Counties Radio, won an unprecedented three Sony Radio Academy gold medals for his remarkable live coverage of Vauxhall UK’s decision to cease car production in Luton after 95 years.
But Gaunt and SunTalk had a powerful rival in Paul Lewis of the Guardian. By any standards, Lewis had used Digital Innovation to great journalistic effect: The Guardian’s G20 coverage.
The paper’s nomination form told how Lewis and a Guardian team used internet tools such as Scribble Live and Audio Boo to broadcast audio reports about the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests.
Eventually a New Yorker got in touch to say he had seen the reports and had a video showing the police beating Tomlinson. Without sophisticated use of the internet, the story might never have come out.
They were the obvious front-runners – at least in the minds of the judging panel.
But how to decide between the two? On one hand, there was a newspaper extending its brand into a new medium with the accompanying advantage that Jon Gaunt had been liberated from the prospect of having to worry about a string of complaints to Ofcom.
On the other, there was the comprehensive use of the latest internet technology to break an important news story and one that helped to right an injustice and also asked serious questions about the use of force in policing of demonstrations and riots.
How to choose? From the start, there was an obvious problem with two judges believing passionately that the Sun’s work was ground-breaking.
Two others believed strongly that it was the journalistic outcome achieved by the Guardian that mattered and should be decisive. After all, both were merely adapting existing internet potential for new purposes.
There was a problem. The fifth judge had been unable to attend the final judging session.
It would have been legitimate under the rules for the chairman of the judges to use his casting vote to break the deadlock.
That would have resulted in a win for Paul Lewis and the Guardian.
Instead it was decided, perfectly reasonably, to consult the absentee judge. He turned out to be strongly in favour of SunTalk and so it was that it was Gaunt who went to the podium.
Lewis did not leave the awards ceremony empty-handed and in fact won the rather more prestigious Reporter of the Year award.
Judging conventions
There is an unwritten law of judging journalistic awards. One, or at most two entries, usually stand out as clearly as if a light has been turned on. You can watch, listen to, or read your way through box loads of entries that are almost invariably good by almost any standards and then comes along the one that has that spark of creativity or innovation or handles compelling events with distinction.
Not so with digital innovation. You could make a plausible case for more than half a dozen of the thirteen entries and they would not have looked out of place going up to get the award.
In a way, the challenge facing the judges of a small specialist category mirrors the difficult choices in the much bigger categories - how can you possibly compare the work of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal with that of the Sun and the Daily Mirror.
What are the criteria? It is a technology competition – strictly innovation? Is it the story that is ultimately the thing or a judicious combination of the two?
There are no obvious rules for deciding such things and the outcome is often determined by previous personal experience and instinct and any self-respecting judge would have to admit that the result is often inevitably capricious.
WSJ and the Berlin Wall
Take the Wall Street Journal entry which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. By any standards it was an accomplished piece of work.
It told the story of the Wall through the eyes of Terence Roth who covered the story at the time and video interviews with Berliners who recalled their experiences. Then there was contemporary footage, including the famous Kennedy Berlin speech and an interactive timeline.
What counted against it was the fact that it was historic and a one-off that took “weeks of work” and therefore not easily replicable.
It was in effect an interactive television documentary and as a result the link with newspapers, perhaps, attenuated.
Times Labs
There was equal quality from Times Labs which saw computer programmers and Times reporters come together to produce stories that could not have been created by journalistic skills alone. The work has even been cited by the founder of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as a frontier project in “new journalism”.
Great potential but some of the story targeting could be improved.
Times Labs made great efforts to find out the cost of BBC channels and services on a “per viewer” basis. An interesting thing to do except that, as the BBC quickly pointed out, the information had already been published by the BBC Trust in its annual report.
The Guardian iPhone application is fantastic – but not unique. The Daily Telegraph has one, as indeed does SunTalk.
The Guardian also produced an interesting use of the internet in seeking to indentify and post pictures of those who have died or been detained in Iran since the presidential election in June.
The FT Long Room
The Long Room created by the Financial Times was definitely worth a look. In the digital Long Room, financial professionals can chat confidentially to each other without fear of the content leaking to the internet.
Spot on for the FT but perhaps of limited application elsewhere with only around 7,000 people signed up - subject to status - and their thoughts not available to other FT readers. In a way, it is an exclusive closed club, worthy in its own right but is almost the opposite of the openness of a newspaper.
Everything’s coming up roses
The Daily Telegraph also produced innovations that were absolutely central to the preoccupations of readers – last year’s Chelsea Flower Show.
In fact, Chelsea was something of a triumph for the Daily Telegraph. Not only did the paper’s garden designers win the award for a Best in Show garden they also offered a 3D virtual version of the garden. Users could explore the space in detail and, more to the point, online visitors could study and then buy individual plants.
Innovation and commerce coming together. So why didn’t it make it higher up the judges’ list. Difficult to say: It just didn’t. There were mentions but no advocate on its behalf.
Maybe it was just that Chelsea Flower Show was seen as such as such an obvious Telegraph thing to do. Perhaps there was also a subliminal thought that, as the Daily Telegraph was going to win all the main awards anyway, online garden design didn’t cut it and somebody else should have a go.
The Mirror’s strategy
The Daily Mirror had an interesting take on digital development for newspapers. Last year, the paper took a bold decision to move away from trying to reach the mass market online.
Instead, the paper decided to launch two “striking” niche websites. One was the obvious MirrorFootball.co.uk and the other, 3am.co.uk, aimed at the celebrity-chasing market.
The Mirror says that the sites are ahead of target on both revenues and users and have managed to reach new audiences.
Likewise with the News of the World’s Captain Cash, which aimed, among other things, to save readers up to £1,000 on their annual bills; it was well targeted at the paper’s readership.
Did they fail to make it to the final shortlist because SunTalk had already been identified as the main tabloid contender?
In the end, it matters only marginally who finally won the Digital Innovation award.
Much more important is the essential, common lesson from all thirteen entries – that there is an enormous range of impressive digital innovation going on out there.
Further proof, if any is still needed, that newspapers are not a zero sum game.
Raymond Snoddy was a judge in the Digital Innovation section of the British Press Awards and in the 2001 Sony Radio Academy awards.
