The Uniting Church honoured at the ARPAs

Pictured: Uniting Church publications were all represented at the 41st ARPA awards.

For the 41st year the Australasian Religious Press Association (ARPA) gathered it’s 83 member publications and associated journalists for its ecumenical conference and awards night on 28-30 August in Brisbane. The ARPA’s recognise and celebrate the significant contribution religious journalism makes to the media.

Gathering with peers is also a unique opportunity to network and share experiences and knowledge.

The Uniting Church in Australia was generously awarded in a variety of categories across our various state Synod Communications departments, including the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania winning the prestigious best publication of the year for Crosslight and Executive Editor and Director of Communications and Media, Penny Mulvey winning the Gold Award for Best Feature (Single Author) for her story entitled “Australia’s fithly little secret”.

Other Awards included:

• Cross-platform editor Rohan Salmond of Journey (the Queensland Synod’s magazine) was awarded Silver for Best Feature, (Single writer) for their article entitled “Love Your Neighbour”
• Western Australia’s Revive won Silver for Best Theological Reflection enititled “On the road to Jericho”. Revive also received a highly commended for best cover for our October 2014 edition.
• Insights magazine was awarded Bronze for Best Faith Reflection for the article written by Ben Myers entitled “How to make gravy: Christmas for the lonely”
• South Australia’s New Times won Bronze for Best Profile Story entitled “The emigration of Emanuel”
• Wesley Mission won Gold for Best Magazine Design for their quarterly publication Wesley Impact.

The Ramon Williams Scholarship recipients this year were awarded to Emilie Ng, journalist and photographer for The Catholic Leader who won Gold for Best News Story for her article entitled “Loads of help” and Marco Ceccarelli, Journalist and photographer for eRecord, the publication of the Catholic Archdiocese of Perth.

This year the program was titled “Freedom of the Religious Press” which included an opening plenary by Dr John Harrison, who is the Journalism Program Director at The University of Queensland and a regular commentator on the ABC and on Fairfax Radio. His academic interests are in new media, media regulation and ethics, and journalism education.

Subsequent days and sessions focussed on encouraging assembled journalists to understand that as religious publications we have an important voice both in the media and in the community that cannot and should not be marginalised and that we should consider primarily that we can no longer be termed “niche” media outlets – we all have global reach and a story to tell.

Adrian Drayton