The Al Jazeera Media Network’s Digital and AJ+ divisions have won three top prizes and several nominations in the 26th annual Webby Awards that honour “the best of the internet”.
The narrative documentary strand Fly on the Wall won a jury Webby and a People’s Voice award in the Reality: Video Series and Channels category, adding to previous top prizes in the AIB, New York Festivals, Picture of the Year and Telly competitions.
The unscripted, character-driven series is created, filmed and edited by Raul Gallego Abellan.
In a recent episode, Abellan travelled to the trenches and makeshift bunkers where Ukrainian civilians – men and women – prepared for the Russian invasion.
Six additional nominations were shared among news and current affairs podcast The Take, the Al Jazeera English Twitter channel, the Product Development and Innovation team for its iOS and Android mobile apps and the Al Jazeera Investigates podcast, derived from and jointly produced with Al Jazeera’s Investigations Unit.
“On behalf of our teams, we’re grateful to have been honoured in this way,” said Carlos van Meek, Al Jazeera Digital’s Director of Innovation and Programmes. “We cover news and current affairs in a variety of ways, as a mini-doc strand Fly on the Wall has done an extraordinary job bringing out the voices of real people in difficult situations.”
AJ+ also added to their long history of Webby wins, earning a People’s Voice award in the Best Content Series category for Voices from Palestine – stories that amplify the all-too-rarely heard voices of Palestinians living under a system that denies their basic human rights.
AJ+ was also selected as a Webby Honoree for their story ‘I Shouted For Help, But Nobody Helped Me’: Asian Americans Are Under Attack in the category of Public Service and Activism.
AJ+ Español earned two distinctions of Webby Honoree for two episodes of their show “Descoloniza” and AJ+ Arabi received a Webby nomination for their coverage of Palestine.
“The heart of our journalism is with the people. Many of them are fighting oppression, whether of apartheid and occupation or the structural inequalities and erasure brought about by colonisation,” said Dima Khatib, Managing Director of AJ+ channels.
All nominations, honourable mentions and jury awards are conferred by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
The Webbys received a record 14,000 entries this year from more than 70 countries, with nearly two million votes cast by some 500,000 users in the Webby People’s Voice competition.
