Red Ink Award for T N Ninan, Ravish Kumar and 25 other journalists

The Mumbai Press Club's annual RedInk Awards for excellence in Indian journalism for 2015-16 were presented at a glittering awards night on Tuesday evening with veteran business journalist T N Ninan being conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award and Ravish Kumar the Journalist of the Year Award.

T N Ninan, chairman and editorial director of Business Standard, was chosen for the annual RedInk Lifetime Achievement Award for his extensive contribution to business journalism through good editorial leadership he provided over the years to a host of publications, a Press Club release said.

Receiving the award, Ninan said there were serious challenges today for running a viable media business. "The minute one wants to charge on the website, your traffic goes to free media. If you raise the cover price of a newspaper - we are the cheapest in the world - you are seen to have a fundamental disadvantage in the market."

For the journalist, his words of advice were: "We (the media) need to raise the profile of what we do, raise the credibility of what we do so that we are proud of what we do."

TV anchor and NDTV India's senior executive editor Ravish Kumar was chosen for the RedInk Journalist of the Year Award for his consistent and down to earth reporting on politics and issues that concern the common man, the release said.

The Red Ink Award for Bravery in Journalism was conferred on Jagendra Singh of Shahjahanpur Samachar posthmously. Announcing the award, Maharashtra governor C H Vidyasagar Rao said Jagendra died in the quest for truth, and his sacrifice should never be forgotten.

Likening the sacrifice of Jagendra Singh, who was set on fire and died on 8 June last year, the governor drew a parallel to the fearless and famous journalist Shoebullah Khan, who had to pay with his life on 22 August 1948 for demanding the merger of Hyderabad state with the Indian Union and for writing against the Nizam in his daily Imroze.

Minister of state (independent charge) for power, coal, new and renewable energy, Piyush Goyal, who was guest of honour at the event, said it was important for the journalist community to see that credible data is being reported after proper verification. "Correctly sanitised data and information are very important... correct data points are the mainstay of a report," the minister pointed out adding that at every level of media "data crunching" and "accuracy of that data" is important.

Goyal said constructive journalism had helped his ministry to a great extent. For example, the power ministry discovered that a number of villages were uninhabited only from a newspaper report. When government officials investigated, it found that there were at least 400 villages that had been abandoned.

The RedInk Start-up of the Year Award was given to TheWire.in, a news and public affairs website founded by veteran journalists Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan and MK Venu.

Apart from these four, awards were also given in the 10 various categories. This makes the RedInk awards the biggest in the country where journalists are awarded by the peers. ''This year the RedInk team received more than 1,500 entries across categories – a significant jump from the previous year that shows the popularity, reach and credibility of the awards among the fraternity. The curators and jury members had gone through a tedious but thrilling exercise before arriving at the final list,'' said Gurbir Singh, chairman of Mumbai Press Club.

Star India is the principal media partner of the Redink Awards, which is supported by the Aditya Birla Group, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Zee Entertainment, Eros International, Indiabulls Housing Finance, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, 63 Moons and JSW Group.

In a period when journalists and journalism are under severe threat and pressures from violence, vested interest and hashtag writing, the theme for the Redink Awards-2016 is: 'To Rise Above It All.

The awards event also saw a fast-paced panel discussion on topics such as 'Who Shot the Messenger' , which veteran journalists and columnists, including Shobhaa De, Ravish Kumar, Siddharth Varadarajan,  Sucheta Dalal and Minhaz Merchant debated.