The inaugural Future of News Awards rewards the best in TV and online video news

The winners in the first edition of The Future of News Awards, organised by afaqs!, were feted at a ceremony in a jam-packed hall in New Delhi last evening. The Awards aim to celebrate the best of news on television and via online video.

It was thus open to TV news channels as well as pure-play online news brands. While TV news brands dominated, a few of the online players also did extremely well.

Network 18 (including CNBC-TV18, News18, and CNN News18) has won 16 gold metals. Zee Media including WION has won 15 gold. TV9 Network and The Quint grabbed six golds each. ABP Network took home five golds. Brut, India Today and Times Internet won a gold each.

In the first edition, the Awards were open to entries only from English and Hindi news channels. There were three super categories - Programming, Design and Packaging, Marketing – made up of 23 sub categories.

The entries were judged by a 13-member jury of well-known names from the advertising, media and marketing worlds: Atul Shrivastava (Laqshya Media); Deepak Ajwani (ET Digital); Harsh Deep Chhabra (Mindshare); Jasmine Sachdeva (Zenith), Naveen Kathuria (DDB Mudra); Neha Chimbulkar (Quora); Pradeep Dwivedi (Eros); Raj Nayak (House of Cheer); Rajesh Upadhyay (Jagran New Media); Sabbas Joseph (Wizcraft); Subha Sreenivasan Iyer (Godrej Consumer Products); Sujata Dwibedy (Dentsu) and Yatnesh Pandey (Greenply).

The jury rated the entries on a scale of 1-10. Each entry was reviewed by between five and seven jurors.

The average score of all the entries (not just the winners) was 5.9 which showed that the overall standard of entries was high, Sreekant Khandekar, the cofounder and CEO of afaqs! He added: “We have displayed the jury rating for winning entries on each winner’s slide in the interest of transparency.” He said that afaqs! was committed to conducting the Awards with the highest level of fairness and impartiality possible.