The BOBs

The 2nd April the voting for the Deutsche Welle International Blog Awards, The Bobs, has begun. Since 2004, these annual awards champion the best blogs of the internet sphere. They aimed to show that his new form of communication was worthy of being taken seriously. 

There are 17 different categories which are awarded: Best Blog, Best Use of Technology for Social Good, Best Social Activism Campaign, Special Topic Award Education and Culture, Best Video Channel, Reporters Without Borders and other language-specific categories. 

The goal of this last category is to choose the best blog in 11 contest languages: best blog Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. 

In each category, there are two different winners. On the one hand, the user winner, which is the blog more voted by the internet users. And, on the other hand, the jury winner, which is choosen by qualified jury (formed by bloggers, journalists...)

I would like to highlight the category called Reporters Without Borders. 

Reporters Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that fights for freedom of the press and freedom of information. It defends journalists and media asistants imprisoned or persecuted for doing their job, fights against censorship and helps (on a financial way) journalists in difficulty. It pays special attetion to those journalists who work in war or conflictive places. Some of these journalists show this point of view through a blog, which sometimes can be really dangerous, that is why I consider it is an important category.

Last year, the winners in this category where:

Jury winner: juarezenlasombra.blogspot.com/. A girl who reports on the situationj of a city in northern Mexico that suffers on the situation of a city in northern Mexico that suffers from the grip of crime. She talks to victims, the futile work of the police and shines a light on th cartels brutality by publishing the therrible ways they work.

User Winer: novayagazeta.livejournal.com/. The collective blog of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper's editorial team. The paper, for which murdered journalists.