Scoop Update #2 - Scoop Almost Triumphant!

Monday, 9 July 2001, 10:54 am
Column: Alastair Thompson

Scoop Update #2

Scoop Almost Triumphant!

Good Morning My Scoop Community…

Wellington has woken to yet another gorgeous, glistening, frosty mid-winter morning.

As promised in Scoop Update #1 the story of Scoop at the ComputerWorld Excellence awards, including a C.D. Sludge draft award acceptance speech, Guy’s World, and pictures, will be compiled once Scoop has caught up on the weekend’s news happenings (563 email messages!), not to mention Parekura Horomia and his house in the Dominion this morning. (Here we go again. Let the excellence resume.)

In the meantime we can reveal that we all had a great time.

Scoop’s builder, software guru and technical director Andrew McNaughton remains aloft on Mt Ruapehu today, and looking at the weather it seems he will be having another great time today.

Scoop was in with a pretty good chance till the very end as we were up for the top award of the night, Overall Excellence in IT, which was presented second to last, just before Paul Swain was commended for his excellence.

In earlier awards the other two finalists in our category had both already collected statuettes, so this looked encouraging, but the competition was clearly pretty impressive.

Then when the IBM presenter of the award (IBM was the sponsor) remarked on remarkable achievements on small budgets, we almost thought we were going to achieve a remarkable coup.

He opened his envelope… and the winner is…. South Auckland Health won for an emergency management system.

This is, of course, a pretty fair call by the Judges.

These people are saving and improving thousands of poor people’s lives in South Auckland with computers – and Scoop is basically a low-budget political e-zine. Excellent maybe, entertaining, highly informing and likeable perhaps, but in reality still just an e-zine.

And so Scoop says congratulations to the doubtless awesomely excellent team from the Emergency Services computing team at Middlemore Hospital.

It was 10.30pm before the news came, and by then we had all enjoyed plenty of hospitality, so the disappointment was not too great. And stil more excellent Auckland hospitality that followed late into the night further dulled the blow.

And so Scoop now has lots of shiny certificates, memories of fantastic time well had, and pictures to remember it by.

The Scoop Team thanks everybody who has helped to make this possible. Thankyou! Thankyou! Thankyou! You know who you are!

Alastair Thompson
Scoop Editor
Scoop

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

• Linkedin
• Twitter - @althecat
• Facebook
• Email - alastair@scoop.co.nz