ST wins 2 international awards for digital story packages on Joseph Schooling, migrant crises

The Straits Times won an Award of Excellence from SND for its digital story package on Joseph Schooling's Olympic gold. ST GRAPHICS
The Straits Times won an Award of Excellence from SND for its digital story package on migrants called Fleeing To Survive. ST GRAPHICS

SINGAPORE - The Straits Times has won two Awards of Excellence for its digital story packages on Joseph Schooling's Olympics win and on the global migrant crisis in an annual digital news design competition held by the Society for News Design (SND).

ST is among other international news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and The Guardian to receive an award from the United States-based SND's sixth annual competition.

The Award of Excellence, which highlights work that goes beyond technical or aesthetic competency and honours daring and innovative approaches, was given to 271 entries.

ST Digital's package for Joseph Schooling's stunning win, titled How Joseph Schooling Achieved The Impossible, tracked the Olympian's performance in the pool with the use of interactive graphics.

The package, published in August last year, compared his timings at various points in the race with that of other swimming greats such as American Michael Phelps and South African Chad Le Clos.

For the migrant package titled Fleeing To Survive, the ST Digital team worked with correspondents from the paper's Foreign Desk to tell the compelling stories of migrants in South-east Asia and Europe, using videos, photos and maps. It was published in February last year.

SND, a respected organisation which encourages high journalism standards through design, announced the results for the 2016 Edition of its Best of Digital Design Competition on its website on Monday (Feb 27).

Almost 60 publications bagged awards, including five gold medals and 27 silver medals.

The winners were picked among almost 1,000 entries by 14 judges from the US and around the world.

Last year, ST also picked up three excellence awards in the Best Of News Design international competition, a separate SND contest for print design. The newspaper won in the overall newspaper design category for the launch issue of its redesign and two other awards for the redesign of ST's Life and The Sunday Times' Life sections.

ST's digital team has been striving to hold readers' attention in innovative ways, said Mr Warren Fernandez, The Straits Times' editor and editor-in-chief of Singapore Press Holdings' English, Malay and Tamil Media Group.

"Readers have many things to do, and to distract them, when they are online. To hold their attention, and keep them coming back, we have to create content that is relevant and engaging," he said.

"This is what our ST Digital team has been striving to do, constantly looking for innovative and interesting ways to do so. These Excellence Awards, from this respected industry group, is great validation of these efforts."

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