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SPH emerges the biggest winner at Digital Media Awards Asia 2021 with 6 wins

Awards - SPH Media Brands

Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) is the biggest winner at WAN-IFRA's Digital Media Awards Asia 2021, bagging two golds and four silvers in six of the awards’ nine categories. 

The Straits Times’ (ST) website (straitstimes.com) won the gold in the Best News Website Or Mobile Service category. ST’s “How To Not Waste Your Annual Leave”, a video series about ways to spend annual leave to quench wanderlust until international travel resumes also took home the gold for Best Native Advertising / Branded Content Campaign. 

These gold winners are automatically included in WAN-IFRA's World Digital Media Awards, where they will compete against the gold-winning entries from other regions.

ST’s third win is in the Best Data Visualisation category, winning a silver for “From 1845 to 2020: See the world evolve through 47,000 headlines”. This feature allows users to explore the evolution of Singapore and the world through 175 years of ST headlines.

Berita Harian’s translation tool, launched in June last year on desktop and mobile, allows readers to instantly translate the news from the Malay-language newspaper to English. It won the silver in the Best Project for News Literacy category.

SPH’s Chinese Media Group took home two silvers. The first, for Best Use of Online Video, was awarded to “Cycle with Zaobao", a 4-episode video series which introduces four different cycling routes in Singapore that are off-the-beaten track. This was produced to encourage Zaobao.sg's readers to join the newsroom in unravelling the gems of Singapore’s urban and natural landscapes during the pandemic, when overseas travel was restricted. 

Mr Warren Fernandez, Editor-in-Chief of SPH's English/ Malay/ Tamil Media Group and Editor of The Straits Times, said: “We have been striving to make progress each year, to serve our growing digital audience well. These awards will encourage all of us in the ST newsroom to keep pushing forward. We are also glad that the efforts of our Berita Harian team were recognised this year, as we work towards finding new, creative ways to engage the community.”

Ms Lee Huay Leng, Head of SPH's Chinese Media Group, said: "We are delighted that zaobao.com.sg has once again received accolades for our efforts in producing informative and entertaining content such as 'Cycle with Zaobao' to engage our readers, especially during the current pandemic situation. It is also heartening to see that our student publication's efforts to make learning more fun for student readers using animation has gained recognition by media professionals in the industry."

Mr Saat A Rahman, Editor of Berita Harian, said: "We are highly encouraged by the recognition of our translation tool, which we developed internally with our Digital Media Products team and SPH Tech to make it easy for our increasingly bilingual readers to find the meanings of difficult Malay words. This is in line with our continuing goal to encourage news reading and preserve the Malay language."

Mr Gaurav Sachdeva, Chief Product Officer, SPH said: "We apply an outcomes-driven and audience-centric approach to product and product feature development at SPH. Hypotheses rooted in strong design research and data analysis drove us to build the hyperlocal translation tool (from Malay to English). It acted as a perfect hook to bridge communities (Malay and non-Malay speaking), and achieved the outcomes of knowledge building and language learning. Similarly, users of The Straits Times website wanted a new and more engaging digital experience. To appeal to them, we designed digital features that not only gamified the reading experience, but also drew inspiration from how people physically consume news. The accolades at Digital Media Awards Asia 2021 for both BH and ST vindicate our digital efforts and instill confidence in the team. We are encouraged to move faster and build capabilities that really matter to our audience. Miles to go before we sleep; watch out for more such winning capabilities in the pipeline."

140 entries were submitted to this year's Asian Digital Media Awards, which were first launched in 2009 to recognise news media organisations which have adopted digital media and mobile strategies in response to how people consume news and information today. 

The full list of winners from SPH:

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