West Africa Democracy Radio (WADR) based in the Senegalese capital Dakar has received the 2011 Knight-Batten Awards for innovations in journalism administered by J-Lab, a Centre of American University’s School of Communication at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
Though four other top international media outlets also received prizes alongside WADR at the Washington ceremony, WADR is the only transnational radio station in West Africa which published in French and English online, on air and on social media.
While receiving the award, WADR Station Manager, Peter Kahler said the new tools developed by Sourcefabric have enabled his station to transform its website into a news platform and triple its audience by providing the radio’s content on multiple outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud for deeper reach into the social media.
Mr Kahler expressed gratitude to the organizers of the event and thanked the Open Society Foundation’s Africa Regional Office for its relentless support to the station. He said the organization provided a grant of nearly US$15,000 for the new website project. “Sourcefabric also gave the station a grant of US$10,000 in professional services rendered by its staff to design and build the website as well as train our staff on its operation. WADR is a project of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) set up to protect and defend the ideals of democratic and open societies by disseminating development information through a network of community radios in the West African sub-region,” he said adding that the station has partnered with 40 community radios in eight West African countries and a chain of correspondents in ten countries in the region.
(Source: Concord Times via Media Network Weblog)
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