On the occasion of the 2013 Bruce Jesson lecture we announced this year’s Senior and Emerging Journalism Awards.

The Senior Journalism award of $4000 went to Alister Barry, for his feature-length film documentary, Hot Air, which tells the history of the politics of climate change in New Zealand from 1988 to 2008. Alister’s film will contribute to public debate on the politics of climate change in New Zealand from 1988 to 2008, and documenting ‘a political struggle over the burning of oil and coal which is causing the extinction of thousands of species’.

He has a track record of completing work that has generated public awareness and debate. His films as writer-director include Someone Else’s Country (1996), In a Land of Plenty (2002) and The Hollow Men (2008), the latter adapted from the book of the same name by last year’s Bruce Jesson lecturer Nicky Hager.

The Emerging Journalist award of $1000 was shared between Ruth Keber, a journalism student at Massey University, for ‘The New Maori Muslims’, North & South (March 2013) and Deena Coster, a journalism student at the Western Institute of Technology Taranaki (WITT), for a portfolio of articles in the Taranaki Daily News (June-Sept 2013).

Ruth Keber’s ‘The New Maori Muslims’, published in North & South, told the story of a young woman’s personal testimony of a flight from abuse to the embrace of Islam, then broadening into an exploration of linkages between Maori and Muslim culture and consideration of Islam and religious diversity in New Zealand.

Deena Coster’s portfolio of articles published in the Taranaki Daily News showcased a student journalist following in the tradition of the best kind of local newspaper journalism, displaying community commitment, social concern over issues like pay and housing and the initiative to dig around.