The Bahama Journal won the best business story award during the Bahamas Press Club Fifth Annual Media Awards ceremony on Saturday.
Bahama Journal editor and reporter Deandre Williamson received the award for the article she wrote titled, ‘EU Demands Money Laundering Convictions.’
The article was published in The Bahama Journal last year.
Also, receiving nominations for best television documentary were Jones Communications Network Sports Director Gerrino Saunders and JCN’s cameramen Edward Lowe and Donovan Brown.
The awards ceremony was held at the British Colonial Hilton under the theme, “Media in The Digital Age.”
The awards ceremony was also held under the patronage of Governor General The Most Honourable Cornelius Smith.
The evening attracted many who laid the foundation for a thriving media profession in the country. There was entertainment by Solo, lots of gifts and prizes.
Anthony Capron, President of The Bahamas Press Club 2014, underscored that “from the beginning of time and through the ages, the central message has not changed. What has changed, overtime, is the method by which that message is brought to the public.”
Communication has transitioned from rock paintings of zigzag lines, dots, and symbols during the Stone Age, to this current era of new communication technologies. Now, stories can be typed and transmitted, photographs taken and sent, newspapers read, radio listened to and television watched from one medium alone: a smartphone, Capron described.
A Blue Ribbon Panel of judges spent record-breaking hours reviewing the works submitted by the media in various categories including hard news, sports, features, business, politics, investigative, columns, documentaries and social media.
The work must have been printed or aired between November 2018 and August 16, 2019. The deadline for submission was August 17, 2019.
The Press Club selected for the Trailblazer Award, the Rt. Hon Hubert Alexander Ingraham, former prime minister, for establishing the framework for private broadcasting and Cable TV throughout The Bahamas.
And, the top honour for the evening – The Etienne Dupuch Lifetime Achievement Award- the recipient was journalist and diplomat Ed Bethel who began his journalistic career in 1959 at the Nassau Tribune under the tutelage of Sir Etienne Dupuch and Sir Arthur Foulkes.
Bethel went on to join ZNS as a sports reporter in 1963 and spend many years there, worked at JCN and other news agencies; a stint at Bahamas Information Services as its executive director and served as Consul General to New York and as High Commissioner to the Court of St. James’s, London, and Ambassador to the European Union. He is also a former president of The Bahamas Press Club.
