Sky, ITV walk away with RTS Journalism awards

Sky News has walked away with the top two awards at this years Royal Television Society Television Journalism awards – a night which was also succesful for ITV.

Sky Correspondent Dominic Waghorn, who is based in China, won the TV Journalist of the Year award for his reports about the “dark underside” of new China.

As a whole, the jury said it was impressed with Sky’s “immediacy, impact and the variety of its coverage” as the channel reclaimed the News Channel of the year title – the fifth time in six years it has won the award.

ITV News also had a good night with the main Evening News winning Programme of the Year, being referred to as “a programme from a team at the top of its game”.

It also picked up the News – Home award for its Selly Oak – A Soldier’s Story feature, and Scoop of the Year for its Charles Kennedy exclusive, which “forced a major political figure to confront an uncomfortable truth which he had preferred not to acknowledge,” the judges said.

ITV Granada collected the Nations and Regions award for its special report of the Morecambe Bay Cockling Tragedy.

Channel 4 won several awards with Jon Snow claiming the Presenter of the Year award.

The BBC claimed just three awards – cameraman Darren Conway won for his work on the Six and Ten O’clock news bulletins. The corporation also picked up the Nations and Regions Current Affairs prize for Stammer – Inside Out from BBC East, which followed a stammer sufferer to New York for revolutionary treatment; and in the Current Affairs – Home category, it won for its Panorama expose of The Bail Hostel Scandal.

The lifetime achievement award went to Nick Pollard, who left Sky News this year after running the channel for a decade.

The evening was hosted by the BBC’s Natasha Kaplinsky at the Hilton on Park Lane in London.