Media figure Rubaie wins first prize in Berlin contest

BERLIN / IraqiNews.com: Iraqi media figure Mohammed al-Rubaie won the first prize in the Economic Open Eye Contest in Berlin while Iraqi journalists Waheed Ghanim and Mohammed Rassoul shared the second award after they turned equal in points, according to the organizing committee. “The final results of the contest, on which work continued for more than three months, had Iraqi media man Rubaie winning the first prize for his report on retreat of agricultural conditions in Kurdistan while Ghanim’s Investment in Basra and Rassoul’s Oil Smuggling in Kurdistan won the second prize,” Mervat Adwan, the director of the Open Eye project, told IraqiNews.com news agency. Adwan said 104 Iraqi journalists have taken part in the contest held by the Iraqi-German Economic Forum in association with MICT Foundation and the German foreign ministry. “Awards are given to distinguished reports in the field of print and electronic economic press,” she added, noting the arbitration panel was composed of 10 members – five Iraqis and five Germans. She pointed out that the 104 Iraqi journalists who took part in the contest offered texts tackling the key challenges faced by the Iraqi economic. “Seventy-eight journalists entered the first test, of which 20 were only selected but only five made it to the final stage. The panel selected Rubaie’s report as the top one, followed by reports by Ghanim and Rassoul.” The three winners will be hosted for 10 days in the German capital Berlin to get acquainted with major German media institutions and will also participate in the meetings of editing boards and newsrooms of major German newspapers as well as visit the Springer Verlag publishing foundation. Rubaie is the chief of the Arabic Desk of IraqiNews.com news agency. He had supervised the two feature stories that won the first and second prizes among competing reports from 11 Arab countries in the Arab Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) contest, hosted in the Jordanian capital Amman late last month. The two feature stories were about female circumcision in Kurdistan by Dlovan Birwari and Al-Qaeda Organization’s recruitment of children by Milad al-Juburi. Ghanim works as a journalist for the al-Alam newspapers and other news organizations in Basra while Rassoul works for the Roznama newspaper in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya. The Iraqi-German Economic Forum, which sponsored the contest, is an economic web site founded in 2009, stemming from the MITC. It aims to brief German businessmen on the most important political and socio-economic aspects in Iraq and also to strengthen economic ties binding the two countries. AmR (I) 71