R.AGE bags another award
Well done: Yee (centre) receiving the Asian Digital Media Award from Wan-Ifra Asia-Pacific Advisory Committee chairman Pichai Chuensukasawadi (right) and Wan-Ifra chief operating officer Thomas Jacob.
SINGAPORE: The Star’s R.AGE team continues its winning streak with a sixth major award for its ground-breaking digital video content this year.
R.AGE won the Best New Product category at the Asian Digital Media Awards on Wednesday night for its successful rebranding as a multimedia documentary journalism platform.
The award came just weeks after R.AGE received the 2016 United Nations Malaysia Award for its work in tackling issues affecting marginalised communities and children.
Earlier in the year, R.AGE was also recognised as the world’s best youth news publisher by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (Wan-Ifra).
“We’ve only been doing online videos and documentaries for a year, so this is really quite surreal for us,” said R.AGE editor Ian Yee, who was also invited to present R.AGE as a case study here at the concurrent Digital Media Asia conference.
“We hope these awards will inspire more young Malaysians to take up journalism, and to create a culture in our country where innovative, change-making news content can flourish,” he said.
Yee pointed out that the submission for the award was done before the launch of R.AGE’s highly successful Predator In My Phone undercover investigations on child sex predators (facebook.com/ragepmp).
“I think many people associate us with Predator In My Phone, which is great because that’s for a very important cause.
“But this award recognises our work earlier this year, like our indigenous rights documentary The Curse Of Serawan, and our World War II series The Last Survivors, which had very important messages as well,” he added.
The Curse Of Serawan helped R.AGE bag its first award this year, an Asia Media Award, which was followed by awards at the Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival for the short documentary The Elephant In My Room, and the Spark Media Awards.
Yee said R.AGE now hopes to set up a crowd-fund that would create a sustainable ecosystem for young people who want to go into documentary journalism.
“We want to enable and empower young Malaysians to create projects likePredator In My Phone or The Curse Of Serawan across the country, especially for causes we at R.AGE might not have the resources to take on,” he said.
On R.AGE’s upcoming documentary projects, Yee said: “We’ve got some crazy ideas we’re working on right now. You’ll just have to keep following us to find out what they are.”
For more info on R.AGE, go to facebook.com/thestarRAGE.
