South China Morning Post has won Citi’s 2019 Journalistic Excellence Award with its story about a facility in Sichuan province that farms 6 billion cockroaches for medicinal and environmental use.
Liu Yujing’s article, first published in June 2018, involved a visit to Xichang, where the insects are being bred in a two-storey building to be turned into ulcer-curing drugs. Six tonnes of cockroaches are killed with heat, and their extracts turned into 600,000 bottles of healing potion every day by Gooddoctor Pharmaceutical Group.
Liu, whose career in journalism began in 2017 as a cadet at the Post, also bagged the Newcomer of the Year award with her reporting of the story, which included her eating a deep-fried cockroach. Tom Bell edited the story, while Zoe Chen filmed a video to accompany the online article.
“Out of more than 100 submissions we received, that was the one story that grabbed our attention the most,” said Betty Yuen So Siu-mai, vice-chairman of CLP Holdings and a member of the award’s panel of six judges. “It was the most memorable, besides fulfilling all of the criteria” to be eligible for the award, she said.
The award, sponsored by Citi for the 10th year in Hong Kong, is aimed at encouraging and recognising excellence in business and financial journalism in print, broadcast and in the digital media.
The criteria for evaluating the winner are originality of thinking, introduction of new ideas, analysis, use of research and the article’s impact.
Infographic: They are very close .... and you can’t escape them
The submissions are initially whittled down from more than 100 to about 20 articles by Chinese University of Hong Kong’s journalism school, before being scored and ranked into three finalists by the panel of judges. The award’s winner is invited to a weeklong study trip in June administered by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Hong Kong Economic Times won first runner-up this year with a story comparing Hong Kong’s housing policies with Singapore’s, while Wen Wei Po won second runner-up with its three-part series on ways Hong Kong’s businesspeople can redefine themselves to compete amid the US-China trade war.