HONG KONG SAR : For the second year SOPA 2024 Awards will feature an “Excellence in Bahasa Indonesia News Reporting” award, honoring stories that set the domestic agenda in politics, business, or social/cultural affairs. A joint venture by Mongabay, BBC Indonesia, and The Gecko Project, The Promise Was a Lie: How Indonesian Villagers Lost their Cut of the Palm Oil Boom, won the top award in 2023.
There are several noteworthy updates to this year’s SOPA Awards. Among them, the length limit in the category of Excellence in Video Reporting has been extended from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. Also, the SOPA Award for Young Journalists will now recognize both an English-language and a Chinese-language journalist.
“The SOPA Awards are a celebration of excellence in journalism in the Asia Pacific region. These awards recognize outstanding journalism across all formats and demonstrate the diverse media space and unique stories being told in Asia,” SOPA Board Co-Chairs Danielle McGuigan from the Financial Times and Sunita Rajan of Bloomberg, said.
Editorial Committee Co-Chairs Yi-Shan Chen, Editor-in-Chief of CommonWealth Magazine, and Bill Ridgers, Asia Digital Editor of The Economist, echoed that message and added: “Since 1982, SOPA has honored the brave journalists that have told Asia’s story. That recognition is now more important than ever.”
The annual awards give smaller publications across the Asia Pacific region an opportunity to showcase their reporting on local grassroots issues as well as regional ones. In 2023, The World of Chinese received an award for excellence for a story on a brutal assault in Tangshan and how it highlighted the need for education on sexual consent in China. Myanmar Now, meanwhile, won an award for excellence for its fearless reporting on those standing up to the country’s vicious junta.
The Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong, known as JMSC, has administered the awards since 2011. The Head of Judges, Senior Lecturer Ting Shi, will work with a judges panel of industry professionals from the region’s most influential media organizations, leading journalism schools, and past award winners.
In 2023, more than 800 entries in English and Chinese were submitted and more than 100 awards were presented for outstanding journalism.