Santhosh George Jacob (center), senior content coordinator, Manorama Online, receiving the awards.Kottayam: Onmanorama.com, the English news website from the Malayala Manorama group, has won the WAN-IFRA award for one of the top 3 news websites in South Asia.
Manoramaonline.com, the group’s flagship Malayalam news website, topped the category. The awards, jointly presented by WAN-IFRA and Google, are the most prestigious recognition of best practice innovation in digital publishing worldwide.
South Asian Digital Media Awards
» Best news website: Gold - www.manoramaonline.com
» Best news website: Bronze - www.onmanorama.com
Onmanorama, a comparatively recent entrant in the English news space, has come top in a category dominated by several established news players that leverage wide television and print news infrastructure. The Malayala Manorama group, a print leader in Kerala, is an early digital adopter and has built up several highly popular digital properties that are leaders in their markets.
"The awards are a recognition of our consistent efforts to improve the delivery of news using cutting-edge technology in order to better the user experience, consistently learning and experimenting with new formats, listening to where and how our readers are going, and anticipating their needs," said Mariam Mammen Mathew, COO, Manorama Online.
Onmanorama offers its readers a complete news experience -- from breaking news, to stories in points tailored for a mobile audience, news analysis and columns, layered with audio and video offerings, slideshows and photo stories. Regular columns by opinion leaders and influencers analyze the stories behind the news and attempt to offer the what-next perspective to the reader. Onmanorama recently increased its focus on multimedia, especially short videos, and has pushed further into interactivity through social media.
WAN-IFRA is the global organization of the world's newspapers and news publishers. The awards are presented in every region – South Asia, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The winners from each region subsequently compete for the World Digital Media Awards.
