RoyalAuto has become the first auto club magazine in Australia to win an award for mainstream journalism.
The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria’s member magazine, along with its digital and social channels, won the TAC Towards Zero Quill for Road Safety Reporting at Melbourne Press Club’s 2016 Quill Awards on Friday night for ‘Impact’ – a year-long TV, digital, print and social media journalism project.
The road safety awareness project followed the stories of several road trauma victims from crash scenes to hospital, surgery, rehabilitation and recovery, and involved partnerships with Victoria’s two adult trauma hospitals – The Alfred and Royal Melbourne Hospital – Ambulance Victoria, the police and other emergency services.
Channel 7 News used RoyalAuto footage to produce ‘Impact’ for its nightly bulletins.
RoyalAuto beat Fairfax Media (The Age, Australian Community Media) and News Corp (Herald Sun) to win the award, with the judges noting they were particularly impressed that journalism of such high calibre was supported and delivered by a corporate newsroom.
Seamus Bradley, editor at RoyalAuto, said the purpose of ‘Impact’ was to go behind the headlines to highlight the suffering of the thousands of Victorians who are injured on the state’s roads every year.
“Through raising awareness, ‘Impact’ aims to encourage people to become safer drivers, governments to build safer roads and car makers to build safer cars,” he said.
“The TAC Quill Award will help RoyalAuto spread that message.”
To create ‘Impact’, photographer/videographer Meredith O’Shea spent months at Essendon Airport with the air ambulance and flying to and from crash scenes.
“The whole team was scrambled into action on many occasions, and after more than a year, we finally had the material we needed to tell the story,” Bradley said.
The ‘Impact’ team is:
- Seamus Bradley, editor
- Meredith O’Shea, photography and video
- Nick Place, writer
- Miguel Rios, videographer
- Lisa Luscombe, art director
- Djohan Kurniawan, web producer
- Georgie Haberfield, social media
- Clare Barry, sub-editor
- Alison Dean, publisher
