PUNCH Is Newspaper Of The Year Again

With accustomed flourish, Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper, PUNCH, has again confirmed its preeminent position in the country’s newspaper industry.

At the 22nd Diamond Awards for Media Excellence awards in Lagos on Saturday, your darling newspaper swept all the top prizes, winning seven of the 12 available prizes and leaving only five for other newspapers to share.

PUNCH beat the National Mirror, which won three prizes in all, and The Nation, which won two, to emerge Newspaper of the Year. The top prizes won by PUNCH were Editor of the Year, Press Reporter of the Year, Judicial Reporter of the Year, the Action Photography award, Best Editorial Writing award and the Informed Commentary award.

PUNCH’s outstanding outing at the awards, an annual celebration of journalistic excellence, is reminiscent of the newspaper’s feats at all the country’s foremost journalism awards in the last four years.

PUNCH is the country’s current holder of the Newspaper of the Year and Editor of the Year prizes of the country’s two foremost journalistic awards – DAME and the Nigerian Media Merit Awards.

PUNCH had won DAME’s Newspaper of the Year award last year, and for the fourth time, after beating The Guardian and National Mirror to distant second and third positions respectively. In the same year, Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper also won the Newspaper of the Year prize at the Nigerian Media Merit Awards, for the second year in a row.

During the Saturday event, which started around 8pm at the Sheraton Lagos Hotel and Towers, Ikeja, DAME also gave lifetime achievement awards to two veteran journalists, Mr. Felix Adenaike and Mrs. Omobola Onajide.

Mr. Adenaike, one of the country’s most distinguished journalists, is a former Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief of the defunct Sketch newspapers, and also a former Editor-in-Chief of the Nigerian Tribune. Mrs. Onajide was the first Nigerian woman to work in a television newsroom and the first General Manager of the old Midwest Television.

PUNCH’s Controller, Publications, Mr. Adeyeye Joseph, the editor of the newspaper in 2012, the year reviewed, beat Steve Ayorinde, a former editor of the National Mirror, to win the Nigerian Guild of Editor’s Prize for Editor of the Year. Joseph had also won the prize last year.

The newspaper’s Editorial Board, which has won critical acclaim for its hard-hitting pro-people editorials won the Tunji Oseni Memorial Fund prize for Editorial Writing. Its winning entry was an editorial, ‘13 years of democracy and despair’, published on May 29, 2012. The prize came almost a year to the date that the newspaper’s editorial board had published one of the most shared and widely discussed editorials in the country in 2012.

The prescient editorial, Jonathan Spendthrift: Enough is Enough, had flayed the Goodluck Jonathan administration for its extravagance.

PUNCH’s serial award-winning journalist and Editor, Sunday PUNCH, Toyosi Ogunseye, won DAME’s Sam Amuka Media Fund prize for Press Reporter of the Year. Ogunseye’s winning entry was a three-part story titled, ‘The rich also cry: A tale of deaths and diseases in a heavily polluted upscale estate.” To clinch the prize, Ogunseye beat Sam Oluwalana of National Mirror and Lucas Olumuyiwa of Tell.

Earlier in the year, Ogunseye’s story had won the Health Prize in the CNN African Journalist of the Year awards held in South Africa. Only last month, Ogunseye had also emerged runner-up Best Young Journalist from the Developing World at the United Kingdom Foreign Press Association’s Media Awards.

Of the three journalists nominated for the DAME prize in Judicial Reporting, two were PUNCH journalists. They were PUNCH’s current outstanding employee of the year, Eniola Akinkuotu, and the newspaper’s Judiciary Correspondent, Adeyemi Adesomoju. But in the end it was Adesomoju, who picked up the Justice Omotayo Onalaja Prize for Judicial Reporting. Adesomoju’s winning entry was ‘One day in court, life in jail’ published on June 25, 2012. Akinkuotu, whom PUNCH had rewarded with a brand new car for his emergence as the company’s outstanding employee of the year, emerged first runner-up, beating Francis Famoroti of the National Mirror to third place.

PUNCH also had two nominations in the Action Photography category. The newspaper’s Photo Editor, Olusegun Bakare, and photojournalist, Adegoke Famadewa, were nominated alongside Ezekiel Adeparusi of the National Mirror.

However, it was Bakare’s photograph of a physically challenged man being assisted during the January 2012 subsidy protest in Lagos that won the prize. Famadewa emerged second runner-up with a June 1, 2012 shot of a tanker fire that killed two persons and razed 10 trailers.

Your newspaper also had two nominations in the Informed Commentary category. PUNCH’s Friday columnist, Prof. Ayo Olukotun, won the Alade Odunewu prize for Informed Commentary with his piece titled, ‘Wanted: An alternative national honours system’.