The Jakarta Post has won the 2020 Public Service Journalism Award from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) for the #NamaBaikKampus (#CampusReputation) collaboration.
The project, initiated in 2019 by the Post, Tirto.id, VICE Indonesia and BBC Indonesia, revealed sexual abuse allegations in higher educational institutions throughout Indonesia, based on the testimonies of 174 survivors from 79 state, private and religious universities. BBC Indonesia later withdrew from the project.
Six Post journalists were awarded for their contribution to the project: Evi Mariani, Gemma Holliani Cahya, Apriadi Gunawan, Bambang Muryanto, Jon Aprizal and Nedi Putra.
The prize acknowledges outstanding journalistic work in the Asia-Pacific region with an excellent contribution to public service.
“This piece demonstrated high impact collaborative journalism on the widespread but hidden crime of sexual assault on university campuses,” the SOPA judges noted during the virtual awards ceremony on Wednesday. “This project checks all the boxes of public service: it reached out to affected people, showed the scale of the problem and inspired a public conversation.”
Runner-ups for the award were Chinese publication FactWire with “Track the fake news in Anti-Extradition Bill Movement” and Taiwanese media lab READr with “Fact Checks of the 2020 Presidential Election”.
Reuters previously won the public service journalism award in 2018, when the category was established, with “Persecuting the Rohingya” story and again in 2019 with “Erasing the Rohingya”, which uncovered the lead roles of Myanmar’s soldiers and paramilitary in the massacre of Rohingya Muslims.
The #NamaBaikKampus collaboration also won the 2020 Tasrif Award in early August, which was given by the Independent Journalist Alliance (AJI) to stories that fulfilled the public’s right to information, that utilized the press’ function for social accountability and that revealed hidden injustices.
The AJI also gave the same award to the Post, Tirto and Jayapura-based publication Jubi for a joint investigation of an episode of deadly unrest in Wamena, Papua, that broke out on Sept. 23, 2019.
Among other discoveries, the report found that the government had not publicly revealed that at least eight native Papuans had died of gunshot wounds inflicted by people whom locals referred to as “security officers”.
The Wamena report also received the gold prize at the 2020 Indonesia Print Media Awards (IPMA) for Best of Investigation Reporting in February.
The Post also won a bronze prize at the 2020 IPMA for the Best of National Newspaper for its April 18, 2019 edition, in which the story “Five More Years” was featured. The story about how incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo secured his second term following the 2019 presidential election.
