Babak Fakhamzadeh: Winner of the prestigious Highway Africa new media award
September 11 will live on in infamy! (What? That’s nothing new? Oh well.) Yesterday, Ismail Farouk and I won the prestigious Highway Africa new media award for our creation Soweto uprisings . com. The cheapskate organizers of the event only allowed for one of us to visit the show, so Ismail is currently being dragged from one interview to the next and was on live SABC television. During the show, our website was called “The most innovative site in Africa”. I think that’s a bit rich, but who am I to argue.
The largest media conference on the continent was held in Grahamstown and tackled loads of topics. On late night SABC Africa news, the conference was mentioned, but the five minute segment only talked about how journalists should deal with issues such as South Africa’s terrible health minister being convicted for theft and her generally acting as a total arsehole.
Prizes were handed out in three categories: Corporate, individual/student (which we won) and non-profit. The corporate category was won by Amatomu, a blog aggregator for the South African market. A very decent website, but backed by the guys behind the Mail & Guardian, easily South Africa’s best newspaper. It would be tough for them to crap this one up.
The non-profit category was won by www.islamonline.co.za or islamonline.net, news articles don’t seem to agree. If it’s the former, it’s sad.
Here are a few write ups from around the web:
+ BizCommunity wrote an article about the event, lists the winners and gives some background.
+ AfricaNews has an article and a video interview with Ismail.
+ The Association for Progressive Communication (sounds fancy!) blogs about it.
+ Some Brazilian website on digital culture picked up the news as well.
+ The Dutch newspaper DePers also wrote a nice article on it.
Ismail is at the conference for almost the whole week and is being pushed around from interview to interview, no doubt ending up every night in his hotel room with ten babes on every finger.
Man. Why am I sitting behind my PC writing this, not enjoying the good life? I could be rich! RICH!