Al Jazeera wins Best Website at Online Media Awards

For the second consecutive year, Al Jazeera Media Network has won the ‘Best Website’ award at the annual Online Media Awards ceremony held in London, along with five other awards and four commendations.

The awards hosted on Thursday evening by The Drum were judged by a panel of journalists, PR professionals and media personalities. Other organisations nominated for awards included CNN, Britain’s Channel 4 and the Independent.

The network’ was honoured in London on Thursday night and captured six top prizes in total, which also included: the best breaking news coverage of the failed coup d'etat in Turkey; the chairman’s award; best Twitter feed; best photographer for Showkat Shafi from Kashmir; and best brand development for Syhacked, the gamification of investigative journalism.

The website also won several honourable mentions. Al Jazeera’s social video team was identified for its work, producer Patrick Strickland’s Overlooked America series was highlighted, and India’s Menstruation Man also received recognition.

Broken Homes, a project that looked at the Israeli policy of demolishing Palestinians’ homes in occupied East Jerusalem, received a commendation for technical innovation.

“It’s an honour for all of us at Al Jazeera to be considered the best website of the year by our peers in the digital media industry,” said aljazeera.com’s Online Manager Imad Musa.

“Our aim is to provide the best information we can across all platforms, every day, so that we can all understand our world a bit better.

"We have the best journalists in the world, and we have heart, and that’s what’s important.”

In its seventh year, the Drum Online Media Awards “identify the cleverest, boldest and most original purveyors of news and views from around the world”, according to its website.

“The industry has its obvious big hitters in CNN, The BBC and The Huffington Post to name a few. With great resource and imagination, you would consider them unbeatable, yet, it can be some of the smaller news sites that can break the biggest news,” it said.

In 2016, Al Jazeera English Online won three awards which included the Best Website of the Year, while Al Jazeera’s Yasir Khan won Online Editor of the Year and Al Jazeera’s Alaa Batayneh won the award for Most Effective Media Toolkit.

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