NZME Celebrates NZ Herald And BusinessDesk Award Success At Voyagers

20 August

New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME) is celebrating big success at this evening’s Voyager Media Awards, with NZ Herald celebrating an impressive haul of digital, team and individual awards, and BusinessDesk celebrating a win.

For the third consecutive year, NZ Herald picked up the two esteemed digital awards - Website of the Year and News App of the Year. The Weekend Herald was named Weekly Newspaper of the Year and Canvas magazine judged best newspaper magazine. Hamish Fletcher also won Editorial Leader of the Year.

In addition, the Herald’s 90% Project was judged joint winner of best editorial campaign, a project that won global recognition at this year’s INMA awards. Furthermore, NZME’s special series on dementia - The Brains Trust - was awarded Best Documentary, and NZME celebrated many individual winners including Brett Phibbs - Photographer of the Year, Simon Wilson - Feature Writer of the Year (short form) and BusinessDesk’s Jem Traylen – Best Student Journalist.

NZME managing editor Shayne Currie tonight praised NZME’s newsrooms, saying the awards were testament to the stellar work of the company’s journalists.

“To win the two biggest digital awards in 2020 was a massive achievement and to repeat it in 2021 was astounding. Three years in a row is simply phenomenal. The past three years have marked an extraordinary news period. To be judged best in New Zealand over that time is a tribute to the extraordinary talent and dedication of our editorial teams and the quality, trusted journalism they produce each day, as well as the strength of our digital product and development teams,” says Currie.

NZME’s other individual awards were: Jamie Morton – Best Science Reporter, Jared Savage – Best Crime Reporter, Felix Desmarais – Best Local Government Reporter, Steve Braunias - Best Arts and Culture Reporter, John Cowpland - Best Sports Photographer. The Herald also won best data journalism category, recognising the work of Chris McDowall and Keith Ng.

NZME CEO Michael Boggs congratulated all finalists and winners this evening and says the double win for NZME in the two highly contested digital categories demonstrates the strength of NZME’s digital platforms.

“At NZME our teams have worked incredibly hard to diversify our platforms with a focus on digital, ensuring our trusted and quality content is available to as broad an audience as possible. Having recently reached 100,000 paid digital-only subscriptions in June, we know having a world class digital offering is vital to ensuring the long-term future and sustainability of our newsrooms and our news platforms. To hear the judges praise the Herald app’s usability and display as ‘first rate’ was fantastic to hear,” he said.

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