The title won the coveted gold award from the Institute of Internal Communication after being judged against the best of the country’s employee magazines and other printed publications.
The bi-monthly tabloid is distributed to 35,000 G4S people in the UK and beyond.
It notched up a score of 88 per cent from IoIC judges who said it “succeeds in every department”. The judges sifted through hundreds of entries to select Awards of Excellence winners across 32 classes.
The gold awards are the institute’s highest accolade. They are judged by a panel of independent comms experts looking for “the crème de la crème of internal communications”, institute chairman Dominic Walters told the awards night audience at the Park Lane Hilton.
Judges said The Link contains writing of “a very high standard in terms of tabloid journalism” and had all the hallmarks of a designer “clearly in command of his craft”.
They said: “Even non-G4S employees will find The Link enjoyable. Not just because the stories themselves are interesting and well written, but also because the design, imagery and overall look are extremely engaging.”
The winning issue carried an exclusive splash about a G4S employee wrongly convicted and imprisoned in Afghanistan before being freed after pressure from the company and the British Government.
When the freed employee arrived back in the UK The Link editor Alan Ratcliffe was there, with a photographer, to interview him in the arrivals hall.
The gold was one of five awards picked up for The Link on the night. Another Pressgang tabloid, The Energy produced for Centrica Energy, won three.
It represented not just a great night for Pressgang and G4S but for tabloids in general, said editorial director Steve Turner.
He said: “Of course it was fantastic for Pressgang and underlines our reputation as the masters of corporate newspapers.
“But it is also a massive accolade for G4S – well-deserved recognition for its commitment to communicating with front-line employees using a style of publication its workers read every day.
“And it’s a great result for corporate newspapers. More than 26 million people read a newspaper every day so it’s a safe bet that organisations with a largely blue-collar workforce are going to have a big chunk of people for whom the tabloid is the way they prefer to get information.
“Pressgang produces successful magazines and e-zines but comms teams often overlook the fact that, for a newspaper-reading workforce, a tabloid can be the most dynamic, engaging and credible means to get across those corporate messages.”
