THE BusinessMirror swept the awards in this year’s Jose G. Burgos Jr. Awards for Biotech Journalism held on Wednesday at a hotel in Dasmariñas, Cavite.
For the Best News category, the BusinessMirror contributor Henrylito Tacio got the top prize for the article “Think of These—Understanding Bt technology.”
Marvyn Benaning bagged the second prize for “US environmental scientist claims pesticide use by GMOs on the rise.”
Reporter Joel San Juan won third prize for his article “Group petitions reversal of CA order vs gene-modified eggplant field tests.”
For the features category, “Biotech corn making a farmer the community’s VIP”written by contributor Clement Dionglay won the first prize. Second prize went to “Scientific interventions provide healthier rice varieties,” by contributor Rowena Galang-Bumanlag.
The third prize went to “Golden Rice,” also written by Tacio.
The BusinessMirror also won the lone prize for Institutional Category which, is given to the newspaper that published the most number of articles on biotechnology.
This year’s Ninth Jose G. Burgos Jr. biotech awards had Ester Dipasupil, desk editor of Philippine Daily Inquirer; Dr. Vivencio Mamaril, Bureau of Plant Industry-Plant Variety Protection Office head; and Maria Monina Cecilia Villena, Special Projects Coordinator and Network Administrator of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture-Biotechnology Information Center as members of the board of judges.
The articles were judged based on the blind-judging method wherein the names of the writers and the newspapers where the articles were printed were erased, thereby, making their identities unknown to the judges. The articles were judged based on relevance, 25 percent; quality of story, 25 percent; being in-depth and investigative, 25 percent; and style, 25 percent.