Hope and Glory

Professional awards in Malta are not always what they're cracked up to be. The Malta Music Awards and the Malta Web Awards immediately spring to mind along with the words not, taken, and seriously. However, the annual Malta Journalism Awards, presented by the Institute of Maltese Journalists, is a solid exception to this.

The 15th Annual Malta Journalism Awards will be announced this evening during a ceremony at the Audio-Vision Centre in Hamrun.

Formerly known as the Malta Press Club, the Institute of Maltese Journalists has presented an annual awards ceremony since 1990. The first edition was very simple. Tonio Bonello (who wrote for the weekly church newspaper Il-Gens at that time) was selected by a panel of local experts as the journalist of the year. The following year broadcasting was added to the list of nominations, and the first broadcast journalism award went to TVM's Joe Dimech.

Photojournalism was introduced as a new category in 1996 and Darrin Zammit Lupi swept the first of his three awards since then. Cartoons were added to the list of categories in 1998, with Maurice Tanti Burlo (Nalizperla in the Sunday Times) grabbed the first of the 3 awards he has won over the years.

Other categories were introduced since 2000: sports, travel, culture journalism, and e-journalism. In 2002, the broadcasting category was split into a writing award and a video award.

The awards are for work published/broadcast in the previous year. So this year's awards are for articles, features, reports, photos and cartoons from 2004.

Since 1998 have also honoured a number of journalists for going beyond the requirements of normal journalistic practice during their career. The winners of the Gold Award Fr Joe Borg (1998), Anton Cassar (1999), Frank Attard (2000), J.G. Vassallo (2001), Anthony Montanaro (2002), John Manduca (2003) and Charles Grech Orr (2004).

The first e-journalism award in 2003 was won by MaltaMedia.com's Martin Debattista, who remains editorial director of the MaltaMedia Online News service. Martin won the Radio Journalism Award in 1998 for his pioneering work about the Internet on Radio Malta 2.

This year MaltaMedia has all three final nominations in the e-journalism awards. One nomination is for the whole team that worked on the perennial year-end feature 2004: A Year in Review, coverage of Julie & Ludwig at the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, and the 2004 PN leadership election. MaltaMedia's Brussels correspondent Pierre J. Mejlak is nominated for his interviews with the President of the European Commission Romano Prodi and Jens-Peter Bonde, MEP and chairman of the euro-critic Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities, as well as a follow-up interview with Sharon Ellul Bonici and other reports he wrote from Brussels in March/April 2004.

Julian Zarb from First Magazine was also originally also nominated as a finalist in this category. However, his work was disqualified about four weeks ago because the category is for works that have not appeared in print before they are published on the Internet. Julian is a very decent man and a noteworthy tourism journalist, so it's unfair that this has happened to him after the finalist were announced. Out of his misfortune, MaltaMedia garnered its third nomination for tonight's awards.

MaltaMedia's third nomination is for this very blog you're reading now. Yes, that's right, Wired Temples is in the running for the e-journalism award. Robert Micallef had only been blogging for a few days in December 2004, but Wired Temples produced enough material to make it to the final round of the 2005 Malta Journalism Award in the e-journalism category.

Good luck and best wishes to all!

OFF THE RECORD: My money is on Pierre who has flown in from Brussels for tonight's ceremony.

Full list of finalists nominated for the 15th Annual Malta Journalism Awards