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· Alex Crawford wins Best TV Journalist · Innovation award for Sky.com News Sky News won the News Channel of the Year award for a record sixth time at the Royal Television Society (RTS) awards last night (Wednesday 20th February).

Sky News’ Asia Correspondent Alex Crawford scooped the prestigious Television Journalist of the Year award and an Innovation award for Sky.com News made it a hat-trick of gongs for the 24-hour television news channel. 

The annual RTS Journalism Awards saw the channel beat off stiff competition from both BBC News 24 and Al Jazeera English to scoop News Channel of the Year once again.

The RTS judges described Sky News as “highly polished and outstanding in their coverage of domestic and human interest stories.”  

John Ryley, Head of Sky News said: “Winning the RTS News Channel of the Year award six times out of seven is a great achievement and a testament to the hard work, speed and – crucially - the boldness of the Sky News team.  Looking back at the major stories of last year – the Suffolk serial killings, the Glasgow terror attack, the murder of Rhys Jones – Sky News set the pace, breaking the key facts and offering the sharpest analysis.

“Alex Crawford is a first-rate foreign correspondent who cares passionately about her work. She has been based in Delhi for little more than a year, but in that time she has made the patch her own.  Sky News continues the tradition of pioneering programming and the Innovation award for Sky.com News is a real triumph.”

For an unprecedented second year running, a Sky News foreign correspondent walked away with the TV Journalist of the Year award.   Alex Crawford followed Dominic Waghorn’s success in the same category last year, highlighting the news channel’s strength and depth in foreign reporting.

The RTS judges praised her “energy, versatility and authority” shown in reports like The Children of the Red Mosque, where Alex discovered children who had survived the siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad threatening to become suicide bombers.  Over the past year Alex and her Dehli-based team have delivered a string of exclusive reports, from filming rare footage of heroin smugglers in Afghanistan to uncovering child sex slavery rings in India.

Accepting her award, Alex paid tribute to her journalist colleagues in Pakistan saying: “I’d like to say that this has been the year of Pakistan, in my view anyway.  There’s been huge momentous events going on in that country and I’d like to remember the journalists working there now under very difficult, often frightening, often intimidating, always challenging circumstances. Many of them have been killed, many of them have disappeared and I salute their dedication to the profession.”

Launched last October, Sky.com News set out to change the shape of television news by integrating the web and TV. In an era where broadcasters are building output around user-generated content, Sky.com News, presented by Martin Stanford Tuesday to Friday at 7.30pm, champions a “user- generated agenda”. The half-hour programme uses the wealth of data about what is popular on the Sky News website and the internet as a whole to showcase the stories, debates and videos that are lighting up the web. The Royal Television Society judged Sky.com News to be innovative because “it lets the public rather than the news editor set the agenda.”

The RTS Lifetime Achievement award went to John Suchet who came out of retirement to present Five News just over two years ago.

Sky News Crime Correspondent Martin Brunt and Africa Correspondent Emma Hurd were both finalists in the Specialist and TV Journalist categories respectively.  Sky’s cameraman/editor in the Africa bureau Garwen McLuckie was nominated too for Camera Operator of the Year.  Five News, produced by Sky News, was short-listed for the News Programme of the Year and Innovation categories

Ends

For further information contact:

Fabian Devlin, Sky News publicist
Tel: 020 7800 4341  Mob 07920 451 045
Email:  fabian.devlin@bskyb.com

 

·        Alex Crawford

Alex Crawford is based in New Delhi as Sky News' Asia Correspondent. She has traveled the world covering major breaking news stories, including the return to Pakistan and the death of Benazir Bhutto, the Omagh bombing, the death of the Pope, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War.  She has also reported on India’s child slavery, an Australian woman’s journey to India for controversial stem cell treatment and heroin traffickers in Afghanistan.

Alex started out at the Wokingham Times before moving to the BBC and later TV-am.  She joined Sky News at its launch in 1989. As Asia Correspondent Alex covers stories in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.  With the Sky team she has covered the Thai coup, child slavery in India, the Indonesian earthquake, Taliban fighters taking refuge in Pakistan and the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

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