Financial Times wins two press awards

The Financial Times won two honours at the Press Awards ceremony on Tuesday evening, while the FT weekend magazine was highly commended by the judges.

The Wearables at Work project by Sarah O’Connor, Robin Kwong and Aleksandra Wisniewska won the digital innovation of the year award. The project explored privacy and management issues raised by the growing business use of wearable tracking devices.

The judges called Wearables at Work, for which Ms O’Connor wore several tracking devices for a week and posted live updates to Facebook during that time, a “ fantastic use of social media to distribute its work”.

The FT’s digital innovation award entry also included the When Rates Rise project, which sought to explain what happens when historically low US interest rates are raised for the first time in nearly a decade, and Big Game, Big Money, an investigation by news editor Alec Russell into the multibillion illegal wildlife trade that delivered the FT’s first feature film, produced and edited by Seb Morton-Clark, acting head of Video.

Richard Milne, Nordic correspondent, won Business and Financial Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Volkswagen scandal. Mr Milne “produced a thoroughly exhaustive and clear investigation into one of the biggest business stories of the year. He truly got under the skin of VW and showed how it went wrong,” according to the judges.

The FT weekend magazine, edited by Sue Matthias and Alice Fishburn, was highly commended in the Supplement of the Year category. In 2015, the magazine featured the first post-jail interview with UBS rogue trader Kweku Adoboli, interviews with Michelle Obama, the elusive author Elena Ferrante and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom. One judge said the magazine was “really trying to break the mould with a well targeted supplement with great use of illustration”.

Sam Jones, Erika Solomon, Miles Johnson and Janan Ganesh were shortlisted in their respective categories.

Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, said: “These awards show we have a dynamic younger generation of journalists at the FT — guided, of course, by some fine experienced editors.”