Post team scoops four prizes at SOPA awards

The South China Morning Post, the Sunday Morning Post and Post Magazine won four prizes and seven honourable mentions in this year's Society of Publishers in Asia Editorial Awards.

The Post's national team was the big winner. Shi Jiangtao and the team won a total of three Awards for Excellence.

One was in the Scoop Award (Group B) category for a series of articles on the 18th party congress. Among them was an exclusive on a Ferrari crash in March last year and the ensuing cover-up of the scandal surrounding it, which involved then-president Hu Jintao's top aide Ling Jihua .

Former Post reporter Shi won an Award for Excellence in the Feature Writing category for his series of reports about the plight of villagers forced to relocate because of the South-North Water Diversion Project. Shi was also honoured with an Award for Excellence in the category of Reporting on the Environment for his two-part series which probed one of the worst mainland cadmium contamination incidents in decades.

Graphic artist Simon Scarr won an Award for Excellence in the Information Graphics category for "Wiring the City" in November. And Lana Lam, of the Hong Kong news desk, secured an honourable mention in the same category for a series of reports about the secret rendition, through Hong Kong, of Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi and his family by the CIA and MI6.

Former national desk reporter Fiona Tam won an honourable mention in the Human Rights Reporting category for a story last November about how poorly trained migrants are maimed daily using shoddy machines in Pearl River Delta factories.