Citibank set to announce winners in journalism tilt

Citibank N.A. is set to announce the winners of the prestigious Citi Journalistic Excellence Award for 2001 on Tuesday, May 14, 2002.

The grand prize awardee will travel to New York in June to participate in a 10-day business and financial seminar administered by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism under the auspices of Citigroup.

Together with 15 other winners from around the world, the Philippine winner will undergo rigorous workshops in accounting, banking and finance and participate in sessions with leading Columbia University faculty members, senior academicians and policy-makers as well as visit key financial institutions and US government departments.

The awards are given to business, economic and financial reporters for insightful, well-researched and analytical reporting. After a year-round monitoring system, business feature articles of 750 words or more, for scrutiny by the judges, are first uniformly encoded by the auditing firm, SyCip, Gorres and Velayo, to mask the writers’ and the newspapers’ identities. A grand prize winner, and two runners-up will receive awards.

Prominent government and business leaders, and independent media personalities, make up the Philippine panel of judges. The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is involved in the final selection of the grand winner who will attend the Columbia seminar in New York.

Noted economist and University of Asia and the Pacific senior vice president, Dr. Bernardo Villegas, has served as chairman of the judges’ panel since the award’s inception 10 years ago. Other judges are Press Secretary Rigoberto Tiglao, Monetary Board member Teodoro Montecillo, Philam Group president and CEO Jose Cuisia Jr., Globe Telecom president and CEO Gerardo Ablaza, Magsaysay Shipping Lines CEO Doris Magsaysay-Ho, and Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism reporter and CJEA Hall of Famer (three-time awardee) Sheila Samonte-Pesayco.

Terri Thompson, director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism is Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s representative on the panel.

Launched in the Asia Pacific Region in 1992, the Citi Journalistic Excellence Award has recognized over 200 business journalists from over a hundred media outlets in 30 countries, including Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines.