By Guan Kejiang, Jiao Xiang, People’s Daily
The Judging Committee Meeting of the First Silk Road Global News Awards (SRGNA) was held in Beijing on July 20. It was joined by participants in person or through online means.
Adhering to the principles of promoting peaceful cooperation, openness, inclusiveness, mutual learning and win-win cooperation, the First SRGNA presented six awards: In-depth Reporting Award, Commentary Award, Press Photo Award, Press Video Award, Short Video Award on the Fight against COVID-19 and Special Contribution Award. A total of 4,485 entries from 80 countries and regions were collected during the entry phase.
A short video telling a story of global cooperation on combating the coronavirus was nominated for the Short Video Award on the Fight against COVID-19. The video, portraying selfless contributions by medical workers, mutual assistance between countries, and the support from all walks of life, conveys a conviction that the world will finally defeat the virus. It vividly explains the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind.
With an open and transparent award mechanism, the SRGNA is normalized, authoritative, and international.
The preliminary evaluation was completed last year by an academic committee consisting of 28 experts and scholars from 13 countries. This time, the judging committee, consisting of both Chinese and foreign experts, reviewed and confirmed the results of the awards’ second evaluation round, and a total of 20 entries made it into the final round.
MushahidHussain Syed, chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute and head of Pakistan’s “Friends of Silk Road” club, was listed as a finalist for the Special Contribution Award of the First SRGNA.
The evaluation of the awards thus entered the final review stage by the council of the Belt and Road News Network (BRNN).
The evaluation work of the SRGNA is a glorious mission that bears profound significance and great responsibility, said Fang Jiangshan, deputy editor-in-chief of People’s Daily and director of the SRGNA judging committee.
The SRGNA honors media colleagues and people from all walks of life who recognize, spread and interpret the cooperation concept and practice of jointly building the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Fang noted.
The awards aim to build a consensus in which everyone attaches great importance to development and joint cooperation to promote the great undertaking that is building a community with a shared future for mankind, Fang said.
The awards are of great significance and play an important role in rejecting fake information and making objective reports, said MoegamatAneezSalie, Editor-in-Chief of South Africa’s Independent Media (Pty) Ltd. The establishment and evaluation of the SRGNA would contribute to the high-quality development of the BRI, said the Editor-in-Chief.
Sarmad Ali, managing director of Pakistani Jang Media Group said the SRGNA makes the voices of the people and the development stories of Belt and Road countries heard by more, and injects positive energy into the fight against COVID-19 and the promotion of economic recovery.
On April 23, 2019, BRNN held its first council meeting, which encouraged and guided mutual learning and consensus building among media organizations in Belt and Road countries and regions, and decided to set up the SRGNA.
The evaluation work of the SRGNA is a very important task of BRNN. So far, 213 media outlets in 99 countries have become BRNN members, and BRNN’s website is now available in 10 languages, with an average of about 1,500 updated articles per month and more than 60,000 articles in total.
