Bloggers’ reaction to the British Press Awards

Posted by Martin Stabe on 29 March 2007 at 16:57
Tags: British Press Awards, Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times

Here’s a shock: Some right-wing political bloggers have reacted badly to their journalistic bête noir, Polly Toynbee, collecting the gong for columnist of the year. on Monday night.

For the Devil’s Kitchen, this was a sure sign that “everyone else in the MSM is even stupider than Polly herself”.

He went on to claim:

If we needed any proof of the Leftist sympathies and utter mediocrity of the British MSM, this surely must be the clincher although I must admit that handing the National Newspaper of the Year to The Observer would also go some way to confirming the rightness of one’s utter contempt for the entire sorry industry.

DK quickly updated his post to acknowledge the reminder of another blogger, Bookdrunk, that more conservative papers have also won the award in recent years.

Of course, this just proves the point anyway:

If there’s one thing that bloggers who cover the media agree on, it’s that there’s plenty of mediocrity and outright hackery for the entire political spectrum.

Oh dear.

The bloggers who earn their living in the dastardly MSM were a tad more charitable.

Weber Shadwick chief executive Colin Bryne proves you can’t have it both ways. After years of complaints about bad behaviour at the Awards, Bryne was “left wishing for a bit of the old spicy behaviour and wondering why the lady in the gold bubble dress on the next table had to visit the loo every ten minutes”.

City University head of journalism and Press Gazette columnist Adrian Monck was left wishing for wifi — or at least mobile reception in the hall. In Monck’s comments, Neil McIntosh kicks off the much-needed debate about how we should reflect print-online convergence in next year’s awards. More on that important topic soon…

HarperPress editor Annabel Wright. Over at 5th Estate, she congratulates the Sunday Times’s Christina Lamb for winning the fourth British Press Award of her career as Foreign Reporter of the Year.

“Foreign correspondents seem to me a very particular breed, driven to take risks that would terrify most of us,” she writes, before posting excepts from the introduction of a book of Lamb’s journalism that will be published in July.

Update: One of the judges, Rob McGibbon, has some hazy recollections of the night: “award winning drunk of the night was won hands down by Nick Cohen who hugged me like a long-lost brother (we’ve never met) while glugging white wine with an unquenchable thirst.”