Raymond Joseph is the 2022 Vodacom Journalist of the Year overall winner. He won “R100 000 for his long-running investigation into the National Lotteries Commission and its recipients”. He also won the investigative journalist of the year award.
Joseph has been reporting on corruption and mismanagement at the National Lotteries Commission since 2018 with GroundUp. Contrary to popular belief, not all our early reports we ran on the lottery were negative, for example, this one on a successful project at the West Coast National Park. But as Joseph dug deeper he began to uncover more and more examples of corruption and mismanagement.
In this he was often supported by Anton van Zyl, the publisher of the Limpopo Mirror. Van Zyl also deserves an award for his tenacious coverage on the Lottery. GroundUp’s attorney, Jacques Louw, has also worked in the background to fact-check and, even research, many of the reports we have published.
Several other journalists were recognised by at Thursday evening’s award ceremony in Johannesburg:
- The winner of the lifestyle category was Charles Leonard of the New Frame Podcast for “Who’s the blues for?”
- Caryn Dolley won the sustainability category for her article in the Daily Maverick’s newspaper, DM168, titled “SA’s rare plants are being poached to extinction & the ecological nightmare is only getting worse”. The article described the new green crime wave well, “astonishing the audience with the quantities that poachers have bagged”.
- Shiraaz Mohamed of Daily Maverick won the photography award for capturing the “human tragedy within events with sensitivity, while respecting his subjects and deepened the truth that news pictures must portray”.
- Nicky Troll of Carte Blanche won the features category for her piece Tactical Take Down, “which dealt with the growing trend of the criminalisation of key sectors of the country’s economy by well-oganised syndicates”.
- The sport category award went to Hloni Mtimkulu of ENCA “who made it her daily quest to consistently bring the coverage of particularly women in sport into the mainstream media”.
- Athi Mtongana of Newzroom Afrika won the politics category for her story on FW De Klerk’s death, “a major global news story which was handled with sensitivity”.
- The winner of the Financial & Economics Award was Lisa Steyn of Financial Mail for Inside SA’s Mining Mafia, “a story that showed her pursuit of the truth, where she spoke to mining stakeholders and Zama-Zamas to get to the reasons for increased killings in the sector”.
- The innovation award went to Mamaili Mamaila. “This category revolves around both novel techniques and technologies and finding new ways to tell a story so that it provides insights that were not possible before.”
- The opinion category winner was Faizel Patel of The Citizen “who provided a deep analysis and emotions in communicating tragedy, loss and joy in his compelling winning works”.
- The live reporting/breaking news award went to Dasen Thathiah for his contributions to eNCA for their coverage of the KZN floods.
- The young Journalist of the year award went to Gauteng’s Michelle Banda from Daily Maverick.
- The Lifetime Achiever Award went to poet and author Dr Don Mattera, who died in July, at 86. “Mattera used his words to shake the foundations of the apartheid government, backed by an army, on a mission to oppress South Africa’s black majority.”
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