DW awards highlight world’s best activist blogs

A photo blogger from Egypt has won the Deutsche Welle (DW) prize for the best of online activism in 2014.

Mosa’ab Elshamy received the Best Blog prize at The Bobs, a competition run by DW, with the awards being presented on 30 June 2014 as part of the Global Media Forum in Bonn.

The jury also handed out top honours in five additional categories to bloggers and social media activists from Ukraine, the Palestinian territories, India, Bangladesh and China.

Twenty-three-year-old Mosa’ab Elshamy uses Facebook and other online services to analyse current events in Egypt with photos and photo essays, which judges said: “Illustrates in a very impressive way the rifts that exist in Egyptian society. Although we do not all speak Arabic, we can all understand the power of his images.”

The jury’s other major winners were: Best Social Activism for Visualizing Palestine run by a team in Ramallah and Beirut; Best Innovation for the BanglaBraille.com project from Bangladesh, where more than a million people are blind; Most Creative and Original blog for the person behind weicombo, who refers to himself – translated into English – as King@LeftMiddleRight. The Global Media Forum Award went to India’s Khabar Lahariya, a weekly, rural newspaper printed in six dialects. The Reporters Without Borders Award went to the Ukrainian project YanukovychLeaks (www.yanukovychleaks.org), run by a group of journalists publishing documents found in the estate of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych after he fled the country to Russia. 

In addition to the Jury Awards, Internet users from around the world cast more than 70,000 votes in an online ballot, voting on the best blogs in each of The Bobs’ 14 languages.

The 15-member international jury nominated 154 finalists for the competition from the more than 3,000 websites and online projects submitted to the contest this year. 

Full details of the winners can be found here.