JOURNALISTS from The Business Times took two of the three top accolades at the annual SPH Media English, Malay, Tamil Media (EMTM) group awards on Monday (Mar 18).
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) correspondent Wong Pei Ting was named Journalist of the Year, and property reporter Jessie Lim was Young Journalist of the Year.
Asked about her most notable pieces in the past year, Wong cited an interactive infographic on the rise of the chief sustainability officer (CSO) in Singapore, published last April.
To create the graphic, Wong and her ESG teammate Janice Lim dug through historical announcements and annual reports of more than 60 listed companies to understand the kind of people who were being hired as CSOs.
“It was an elaborate operation; we just had to connect the dots and fill in the blanks for every company,” said Wong.
Wong, who joined BT in late 2021, also won Story of the Year in last year’s EMTM awards, for a data-driven report on top university students choosing courses that would lead to jobs in areas such as data science and sustainability.
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Lim has been with the property beat since joining BT a year ago. She was deeply involved in coverage of Singapore’s billion-dollar money laundering bust when the news broke last August, finding multiple angles and follow-ups.
These included the discovery that the suspects had been buying property in Singapore since 2017.
Said Lim: “It’s a very fascinating case and it’s still ongoing. At BT, we are also very interested in following the action as we go along.”
BT editor Chen Huifen said that the newsroom was elated by Wong and Lim’s wins, adding: “They are hardworking, resourceful and are committed to the mission of journalism.”
She added: “While we celebrate their wins, we want to also pay tribute to others who helped to make it possible for our content and products to reach our audiences, such as our editors, sub-editors, and our visual, social media, audience, tech, video, podcast and production teams.
“There are many unsung heroes in the process of content creation, including competitors who helped make us better.”
An infographic on the money-laundering case was one of three BT stories to win awards for excellence. The graphic, which traced the intricate links between the suspects and their companies, was the result of a collaboration across the newsroom, involving Quah Kai Yuan, Joanna Lum and Chaytanya Bandishte from the BTVisual team, Atelier Shen from the Product team, journalists Ng Wei Kai and Claudia Chong, and former deputy news editor Kenneth Lim.
Awards for excellence also went to Uma Devi’s commentary on how Sheng Siong should consider cutting a family member from its board, and senior correspondent Leslie Yee’s commentary on how the government could levy higher taxes on luxury homes and non-residential properties.
The third major accolade at the EMTM awards, Story of the Year, went to Berita Harian journalists Muhaimin Suzaini and Izwandi Azman for a piece on more pilgrims taking a do-it-yourself approach to the religious mini-pilgrimage known as the umrah.
BT’s nomination for Story of Year was for a pair of breaking news pieces on Flash Coffee’s shock exit from Singapore amid unpaid debts, by correspondents Claudia Chong and Sharanya Pillai.
The annual ceremony honours the best work by journalists of the EMTM group in the past year. EMTM encompasses the newspaper titles BT, The Straits Times, Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu. Last year, Tech in Asia, which was acquired to accelerate BT’s regional growth, joined EMTM.
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