Washington, DC — AllAfrica shared a virtual stage with international media powerhouses at the annual Webby Awards, as one of five nominees for Best News Site of 2003. The awards were presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences during a live webcast from San Francisco on June 5.
Google's news site won the top award in the news division, and the BBC's English-language world news site garnered the most votes in the People's Voice competition. The other three nominees were AllAfrica Global Media's news site allAfrica.com, the MSNBC site, a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft, and the Romanesko media news site of the Poynter journalism institute.
The Webby Awards have become the leading honor for web sites, recognizing achievements in technology and creativity in 30 categories. This year's winners include Amazon for Commerce, NASA Earth Observatory for Education, Planned Parenthood for Health, MoveOn.org for Politics, eBay for Services, ESPN.com for Sports, Lonely Planet for Travel and Apache Web Server for Technical Achievement.
Nominees hailed from 25 countries, among them the United States, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany. AllAfrica was the only Africa site nominated.
"To be nominated alongside the world's largest and best known Internet sites, and to be named one of the top five news sites for 2003, is an achievement we celebrate," says Amadou Mahtar Ba, president of AllAfrica Global Media. "That this honor has gone to an African organization is particularly gratifying, at a time when African issues are too often under-reported."
Akwe Amosu, AllAfrica's Executive Editor/Producer, says that the award also honors the 100 African media organizations whose reporting appears on the site. "Every day," she says, our readers around the world can access what people all over Africa are saying about themselves, their countries and their concerns. For that unique voice, we are indebted to the editors, reporters and publishers who make it possible." The AllAfrica site posts over 800 stories daily from its participating publications and from its own prize-winning journalists.
This is the second year in a row that allAfrica.com has been nominated for Best News. AllAfrica Global Media, the site's producer, is a systems technology developer and the leading source of news and information about Africa worldwide. In addition to producing allAfrica.com, AllAfrica distributes through mobile and wireless devices as well as to clients such as LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Comtex, Financial Times and Factiva (Reuters and Dow Jones), which reach tens of millions of end users.
The web site itself, which has grown without benefit of marketing, serves more than 11 million monthly page views and has a searchable archive that surpasses 600,000 articles and documents. Over 14,000 other web sites carry AllAfrica's constantly updating headline modules or otherwise link to the site. In addition, AllAfrica hosts SustainableAfrica.org, a site funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation to provide a digital commons for issues of development and the environment.
AllAfrica has pioneered web services technology and applications, which the company says hold the promise of democratizing access to sophisticated technology tools and unlocking the power of the Internet for development. The AllAfrica technology team, through the non-profit AllAfrica Foundation, is working with African and international organizations and governments on a variety of initiatives, such as delivering health information through community-based centers in rural areas, supporting the growth of small and medium-sized technology industries to create jobs and build local capacity, and, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, providing an interactive communications platform for an African network of conflict prevention groups.
The AllAfrica Foundation plans to launch, later this year, the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Fellowship. The program, which will provide opportunities for African reporters to increase their skills and their networks of support, will honor the work of Hunter-Gault, an American journalist whose prize-laden career has included a strong commitment to the professional development of younger reporters, particularly women and Africans.
"AllAfrica is a small organization with a big job to do," says Chief Strategy Officer, Tamela Hultman, noting that the other Best News nominees enjoy the backing of organizations with substantial resources. Poynter, whose news site is the smallest of the five, has a modest endowment that underpins its basic operations. NBC is owned by General Electric, and MicroSoft's pockets are famously deep. The BBC's news operation is funded from the public purse and employs 2000 journalists in the UK and 42 international bureaus. Market analysts estimate Google's revenues for 2003 as high as $400 million.
AllAfrica Global Media, which is registered in Mauritius, is the successor to the non-profit Africa News Online and was founded to carry on that work when the site was unexpectedly popular and grants proved insufficient to support its growth. AllAfrica has expanded rapidly over the past two years, sustained by small "angel" investments and a growing revenue stream from advertisements, information sales and web services. The company expects to become cash positive during 2004, which will enable it to continue to increase its earnings while supporting the work of the AllAfrica Foundation. To bridge the interim gap between income and costs, AllAfrica's executives hope to find additional investors who want to "do well while doing good."
"It has been a daily struggle, although the challenges have been largely invisible to others," Hultman says. "We tell investors that we are all working hard to make sure they don't lose their money. We say we expect they will make money, though there are, of course, no guarantees. But what we can assure them is that their funds will be effectively and efficiently used to help bridge the digital divide and to keep Africa and its issues in front of the people around the world, including decision makers, who can make a difference to Africa's future."
