Malaysiakini team wins Sopa Award for 'baby snatching' story
The award was granted to S Vinothaa, Ooi Choon Nam, and Affan Amrish Mohd Jalani for their contribution to “Baby snatching: How stateless mums lose their infants in Sabah hospital”, a three-part series on how stateless children in Sabah have been forcibly taken from their parents and put up for adoption...
Malaysiakini has won the Society of Publishers in Asia (Sopa) 2024 Award for excellence in reporting on women’s issues.
The award was granted to S Vinothaa, Ooi Choon Nam, Aidila Razak and Affan Amrish Mohd Jalani for their contribution to “Baby snatching: How stateless mums lose their infants in Sabah hospital”.
The article was an investigation into how stateless children in Sabah have been forcibly taken from their parents and put up for adoption.
Those who contributed to the article, which was published in three languages, included:
Reporter: S Vinothaa
Web developer: Ooi Choon Nam
Illustrator & web designer: Affan Amrish
Editor & Project Coordinator: Aidila Razak
Sub-editors: Basil Foo, Lee Weng Keat & Aedi Asri Abdullah
Translators: Aidila Razak, Low Choon Chyuan, and Tan Hong Kai
In announcing the award, the judges called it “the best kind of local journalism on a theme that would not have been picked up by large international outlets. Powerful reporting”.
Malaysiakini had been nominated alongside articles by The Print from India and Indonesia’s Project Multatuli.
READ MORE: Baby snatching: How stateless mums lose their infants in Sabah hospital
Sopa, commonly referred to as the Pulitzer Prize of Asia, was founded in Hong Kong in 1982 to encourage best practices in the publishing industry and be a voice for press freedom and journalists’ rights in Asia Pacific.
As part of that mandate, it established the annual Sopa Awards for Editorial Excellence in 1999 to recognise and reward outstanding journalism.
Earlier this month, the series bagged the prestigious Kajai Award, the top award in Malaysian journalism, at the MPI-Petronas Malaysian Journalism Awards 2023. It has since been made into a 16-minute documentary.
At the MPI, Vinothaa with colleagues Arulldas Sinnappan and Ramu Sapkota (Nepal Centre of Investigative Journalism) also won first place in the “Best Investigative Journalism” category for a series of reports on corruption and human trafficking within the migrant worker industry. The series was published in two batches, in June and in November 2023.
