NEW YORK CITY, June 30, 2006 -- SAJA Group, Inc. and the South Asian Journalists Association, will honor the winners of the 2006 SAJA Journalism Awards contest at its 12th annual dinner on Saturday, July 15, at Columbia University in New York.
These annual awards recognize excellence in reporting about South Asia, as well as outstanding reporting by South Asian journalists and students in the U.S. and Canada. The Awards ceremony is part of the SAJA's international convention, which takes place July 13-16 and is expected to draw 1,000 journalists and guests from the U.S., Canada, Europe and South Asia (South Asians and non-South Asians will participate).
The awards will be presented at Columbia University by Tom Curley, president and CEO of Associated Press. In addition, Curley will receive this year's SAJA Journalism Leader Award in recognition of his contributions to the industry. In a ceremony being held on Friday, July 14, another SAJA Journalism Leader Award will be presented to Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News. Both awards will be presented by Deepti Hajela, SAJA president and a newswoman for the Associated Press."SAJA's Journalism Leader Awards have always recognized journalists who have made a difference in our profession, and this year is no different," Hajela said. "SAJA is thrilled to recognize Tom and Brian for the high standards they have set."
Previous winners of this award are Peter Bhatia of The Oregonian; Steve Coll of The Washington Post; Rena Golden of CNN; Karen Elliott House and Peter Kann of Dow Jones; Peter Jennings of ABC News; Jai Singh of CNet News.com; Steve Shepard,
former editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek and founding dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York; Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal; and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek.SAJA will also pay tribute to the memory of slain reporter Daniel Pearl, who, as Mumbai bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, was a regular participant in SAJA's cyber activities. The fifth Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding print reporting on South Asia by U.S. and Canadian journalists will be presented that night. This year's winners are four journalists from two Canadian newspapers,Vancouver Province and Calgary Herald, who jointly exposed a marriage scam spanning two continents.
Also at the dinner, the newest member of the SAJA Hall of Fame will be inducted posthumously: A.M. Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor who covered South Asia as a young correspondent and continued to write about the region as a columnist. The Hall of Fame recognizes veteran U.S. journalists who helped shape coverage of South Asia, as well as pioneering South Asian journalists for their contributions to U.S. media. Rosenthal joins previous inductees Gobind Behari Lal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for science writing in 1937; Brij Lal, veteran broadcast journalist who joined ABC News in 1952 (and Gobind's nephew); Rajan Devdas, photojournalist for more than 60 years; Amrit Kakaria, who spent more than 45 years as a journalist in US and India; James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes who first covered India during its struggle for independence and revisited the region in reports over five decades.
According to Sandeep Junnarkar, chair of the SAJA awards committee, these awards "honor the insightful coverage of South Asia and showcase the excellence of South Asian journalists in North America."
SAJA has also announced the winners of its 2006 journalism scholarships: Sumit Dayal and Rubina Madan in the graduate student category; Sonia Moghe in the college category; and Manisha Priyadarshan in the high school category (a total of $5,000 will be divided among these students).
Emceeing the gala will be two prominent South Asian TV personalities, Hari Sreenivasan of ABC News and Suchita Vadlamani of "Good Day Atlanta" on WAGA-TV.
This year's awards contest reflected the higher visibility of South Asians in the United States and the increased attention paid to the subcontinent, including the effects of the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. Below is a list of winners of this year's awards. Web versions of articles and photographs will be available online at the SAJA site in August 2006. The awards will be presented on Saturday, July 15, at 6:30 p.m. at a gala awards ceremony at the Roone Arledge Auditorium at Columbia's Lerner Hall (115th St & Broadway) as part of the four-day SAJA Convention.
The four-day convention will open with a day of workshops on Thursday, July 14, and a reception at the U.S. headquarters of Reuters, located in Times Square. Betty Wong, managing editor of Reuters USA will speak that night. Friday opens with talks by NBC's Brian Williams and Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. After a day of workshops and panels, the evening reception will be headlined by Riz Khan, anchor of Al Jazeera International, followed by a hip hop afterparty, hosted by MTV Desi and featuring performances by three South Asia rappers. The last day of workshops and panels on Saturday concludes with the gala banquet and awards ceremony later that evening. Sunday, July 16, brings a more relaxed event, a networking brunch featuring South Asian standup comics.
"This year's convention will have something for everyone," said Vikas Bajaj, SAJA's vice president and a business reporter at The New York Times. "From hip hop to international relations between the United States and South Asia, the convention will address a range of issues that are of interest to our members, the larger journalism professionand the South Asian community."