STAR bags top Citi journalism award

Philippine STAR business reporter Des Ferriols won the grand prize in the 2001 Citi Journalistic Excellence Award for her three-part story "Cement Dumping War Escalates Between Philippines and Taiwan," which was published in February last year.

The winners were announced yesterday at a luncheon and awarding ceremony of the Centennial City Journalistic Excellence Award hosted by Citibank at the Citibank Tower in Makati City.

As part of her prize, Ferriols will travel to New York in June to participate in a 10-day international journalists seminar administered by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism under the auspices of Citygroup.

She will join 15 other winners from around the world in a series of workshops in accounting, banking, finance and economics, and participate in sessions with leading Columbia and Rutgers University faculty members, capital markets experts and monetary policy-makers. Part of the course also includes a financial writing workshop and a computer-assisted reporting workshop with hands-on training sessions in Columbia’s computer laboratory.

Ferriols will also get to visit key financial institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank, Bloomberg, the New York Stock Exchange, and meet with senior officials from these institutions. Capping the course will be a dinner hosted by Citigroup chairman and CEO Sandy Weill and Citigroup vice chairman Stanley Fischer (formerly of the IMF) who will address the group.

Recipients of the runner-up awards are Business World’s Helen Andrade-Jimenez for her article "Technology: Its Role In The Changing Political Dynamics" and Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Clarissa Batino for her two-part article "Debt Squeeze A Ramos ‘Legacy.’"

Headed by noted economist and University of Asia and Pacific senior vice president Dr. Bernardo Villegas, who has served as chairman of the judges’ panel since the award’s inception, the other judges were: 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. The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is represented by Terri Thompson, Director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism.

Now on its 10th year, the prestigious City Journalistic Excellence Awards recognizes Filipino business journalists who write well-researched and insightful feature articles on trade, banking and finance, the economy, and other business-related topics. Finalists are chosen through a year-round monitoring system. Auditing firm SyCip, Gorres and Velayo uniformly encodes the articles, which should have a minimum length of 750 words, to maintain the anonymity of the writers’ and the newspapers’ identities. The winner is chosen based on the reporter’s analysis and understanding of the issue, originality of thinking, use of research and interview, introduction of new ideas and concepts and impact on the readers.

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