The ceremony attempted to remind the industry that reporting is the point of journalism, writes Dan Sabbagh
Journalism, it is said, is in crisis. Newspapers, it is noted, are losing readers, relevance and, in some cases, real money. Standards, for those who have followed the phone-hacking scandal, have never been known to be worse. And in the era of Facebook, nobody from Australian-American media moguls to Russian oligarchs seems to know quite what to do next.
Yet, amid such fashionable gloom, Fleet Street manages to produce 11 paid-for daily newspapers and two popular freesheets, helping make London the most competitive printed news market in the developed world. In this maelstrom of fact and opinion, on traditional measures, the Guardian looks small. Vanity Fair recently noted, somewhat too overtly perhaps, that the Guardian was Britain's 10th largest newspaper – at least by the stubbornly important metric of daily printed sales.
Size, though, isn't everything. And at a time when it is increasingly common to hear all sorts of creativity labelled simply as "content", and when the talk is of sustainable long-term e-business models, it is easy to forget what the point of a newspaper is. It is of course reporting – for without journalism that enough readers want, nothing else can fall into place.
This Tuesday the annual Press Awards, held in a tightly packed ballroom at London's Savoy Hotel, attempted to remind the industry of just that. These may be the industry's Oscars, but the event is never seen on television, and best known for drunkenness and hot tempered dispute; memorialised by battles between the likes of Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson.
Passions may have calmed in recent years, but the unmentioned hacking crisis – which had seen the News of the World's chief reporter arrested earlier that day – nevertheless ensured there was more than enough needle hanging over the room.
So disparate is the British newspaper business that revelations about Wayne Rooney's sex life from the Sunday Mirror vied with the Sunday Times exposure of how those whose job it was to award the next World Cup appeared to be susceptible to bribes – and both were overshadowed by the larger battle between the News of the World's exposure of no-ball fuelled cricket corruption and the Guardian's investigation into phone hacking by the red-top newspaper.
As ever the gongs were roughly spread out. The Guardian, for its part, won awards for traditional journalism – Ameila Gentleman became feature writer of the year for her work on sexual assault referral centres and the lives of failed asylum seekers who have one £10 weekly voucher to live on. There was success too for the newspaper's World Cup supplement, which saw off, among others, David Cameron: The Journey, from the Sun and a reprise of the Battle of Britain in the Sunday Telegraph.
Print, though, is only part of the future. If the live blog, online reporting's answer to 24 hour rolling news, becomes the staple of newspaper websites, it will be in part due to Andrew Sparrow. The Guardian political journalist anchored the general election live blog, which was viewed between 100,000 and 150,000 times a day during the campaign, and 2m times on that inconclusive election night itself – in a year in which the Guardian's website surpassed 40m monthly visitors and remains not tenth, but number two on Fleet Street after the celebrity strewn Mail.
Those, though, were just the Guardian's individual and team winners. Across the newspaper 2010 was hardly a quiet year, with election coverage lit up by the likes of Marina Hyde and David Hare. Allegations that MI5 was involved in the torture of a British man in Bangladesh were carefully pieced together by Ian Cobain and Fariha Karim. Undercover policing will never the same again after a series of scoops by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis about the long-term infiltration of the green movement by police spies.
Above all, though, there was WikiLeaks. Julian Assange's decision to share a quarter of a million secret or confidential documents with the Guardian will have ramifications for years to come. We learned what US diplomats really read and thought, where they were told that Russia had become a "virtual Mafia state", that China was trying to hack into Google's email system, and where it was thought important enough to describe one up and coming Labour minister as "hound dog with women".
The Guardian's WikiLeaks reporting did not win scoop of the year – that was won instead by the News of the World for its expose into Pakistani cricket corruption. But that journalism played its part in a larger success, in which the Guardian was voted newspaper of the year, the evening's most prestigious prize. Judges described WikiLeaks as "an enormous story with reverberations around the world''. They said it put "the Guardian at the top of the news headlines" and that "some say it will change relationships between governments and the press and public forever".