As foreign reporting budgets shrink at news outlets around the country, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has nominated a literary journal’s foreign coverage for a news reporting award at the 2010 National Magazine Awards for Digital Media.
The Virginia Quarterly Review was nominated for its coverage of the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai, serializing a 19,000-word essay by freelance multimedia journalist Jason Motlagh. The category “honors the timeliness, accuracy and skill with which news and information are gathered and presented by magazine websites and online-only magazines.”
We interviewed Motlagh last year about his award-nominated work. Click here to listen to the whole interview, but here’s an excerpt: “I would encourage young journalists to look for the offbeat destinations, but also look at the places that are saturated–where the coverage has not been as diversified as it could be. Look for the counter-intuitive stories. To set yourself up–it’s important that you develop a body of work on a given area or issue, I think specialization is important now. In this hyper-inundated media climate, it’s important to single yourself out. It can pay to really stick to a topic. if you have a vision, find people who are like-minded who will support it. Think of online media as an opportunity, and not a compromise.”