AUCKLAND (Pacific Media Watch): A team of Auckland University of Technology student journalists has won the 2015 Ossie Award for Best Innovation for a series of video reports about the Rainbow Warrior bombing and the environment.
The student team entry, coordinated by Kendall Hutt, is featured on the Eyes of Fire microsite published by Little Island Press in collaboration with AUT’s Pacific Media Centre and Greenpeace New Zealand.
The Rainbow Warrior project involved interviews with crew members on board the sabotaged Greenpeace campaign ship 30 years on, stories on contemporary environmental issues, and profiles of photojournalists who covered the anti-nuclear struggle.
The project was inspired by a new 2015 edition of David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. Dr Robie, director of the PMC, was an independent journalist on board ship for 10 weeks until the bombing by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.
The Ossie Award, presented at the annual conference of the Journalism Education and Research Association (JERAA) at Bathurst this week, was warmly welcomed by AUT staff and students and microsite publisher Tony Murrow.
'Multimedia-rich'
“The Eyes of Fire project used the online medium well, through a clear, easy-to-navigate and multimedia-rich website, but also contained significant amounts of more traditional video and print reporting, which was tightly edited and interesting,” said the citation by judge Myriam Robin, media reporter of Crikey!
“The two were combined well to both entertain and impart information. Looking through it was an education in the Rainbow Warrior and its significance.”
The teaching team leading the project were Gilly Tyler, Danni Mulrennan and Dr Robie. Television lecturer Mulrennan coordinated the student news reporting team.
The list of students involved in the project is here.
The Ossie Awards are named after Australian foreign correspondent Osmar S. White.
Pacific Media Watch project editor Alistar Kata also reported a series of in-depth stories on the Rainbow Warrior and environmental activism.
The latest edition of the Pen Sydney freedom of expression magazine has published a four-page article by Dr Robie about Eyes of Fire and the Rainbow Warrior experience.
Full awards list
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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