VERA FILES trustees Yvonne Chua and Luz Rimban, and contributor Diosa Labiste won the top prize at the 2009 Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism (JVOAEJ) for their investigative report “Quedancor swine program another fertilizer scam.”
Roel Landingin of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism won the other Award of Distinction for his series “Aid inflow sparks scandals for GMA.”
Labiste, a community journalist based in Iloilo City, was also named Marshall McLuhan Awardee at ceremonies held at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City. Labiste is the first community journalist to be named McLuhan Fellow since the awards were given out in 1995.
This is the fourth time that Chua and Rimban, both journalism professors at the University of the Philippines, have won the top JVO prize.
The three-part report, published in September last year, garnered the Award of Distinction for being “a thoroughly-documented and meaningful report, a substantial contribution to the urgent necessity to understand the link between the country’s continuing poverty and corruption, and which manages to hold reader attention while provoking thought as well as outrage.”
The team got a Plaque of Distinction and a cash prize of P75,000.
The JVO Awards are administered by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) which conducted a seven-month scan of investigative and explanatory reports published in 2008. The scan consisted of three phases and examined hundreds of reports from various print publications, eventually producing a crop of eight considered to be last year’s best.
The other finalists are Newsbreak, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine Star, SunStar Cebu, and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.
Three of the finalists received Certificates of Merit and a cash prize of P25,000. These are “A Policy of betrayal” by Newsbreak’s Miriam Grace Go, “Squatters and the city” by SunStar Cebu’s Cherry Ann T. Lim and Rene H. Martel, and “Less than 10 people in plot; 5 core, 5 others ‘in the know’” by the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Fe Zamora.
The 2009 awards mark the 20th year that the JVO prizes were being given out. It was named after the late Jaime V. Ongpin, who was finance secretary under the Cory Aquino administration. Ongpin was also a businessman who sat on the board of Veritas, a magazine that tested the limits of press freedom under Ferdinand Marcos’ rule. The JVO Awards were created to encourage journalists to practice in-depth reporting on issues of public importance.
The VERA Files Quedancor series was published in early September by Malaya, Manila Times, Business Mirror, and Philippines Graphic. It was made part of the documentation submitted by opposition lawmakers to substantiate the impeachment complaint filed against President Gloria Arroyo in 2008.
