Australia’s youth broadcasters emerged as the strength of Australia’s community broadcasting landscape recently, with Hobart and Melbourne’s youth stations picking up major awards in radio as well as television. The awards show how young broadcasters are very easily working across platforms to produce good quality media outputs.

Apart from the major Community Broadcasting Association of Australia National Awards, youth stations such as Brisbane’s 4ZZZ, Sydney’s FBi Radio and Melbourne’s 3RRR also collected trophies on the night.

Other notable winners led the way in highlighting social and political issues with station 3CR (Melbourne) winning for an outside broadcast from the Baxter Detention Centre and 8KIN (Alice Springs) who raised the important issue of the availability public telephone services in remote indigenous areas.

The awards were presented as part of the CBAA’ s Annual National Conference held at the Gold Coast International Hotel which attracted over 300 delegates and almost 100 community stations.

The major winners included:

Radio Station of the Year: Edge Radio (7EDG) in Hobart.

Television Station of the Year: Channel 31 Melbourne and Access 31 Perth.

The Tony Staley Award: Presented for special achievement by an organisation- to SYN FM in Melbourne for excellence in providing access and services for youth.

The Michael Law Award: Nicola Joseph picked up community broadcasting’s highest individual honour for her long term service, passion, and commitment to the community broadcasting sector.

Nicola Joseph , who is presently both the training manager at the CBAA and a journalist for the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasting Council, has worked at several community radio stations including 4ZZZ in Brisbane and Radio Skid Row in Sydney. She has also worked as a presenter and executive producer at ABC Radio National and at SBS radio.

“I find that community radio is the one place that I can be myself on air and that says something for the sector’s independence and diversity. I have no doubt that our sector’s future is tied up in both providing balance to the rest of the media’s system of “embedded journalism” and in providing diversity which even the ABC and SBS-TV have abandoned on recent years,” said Joseph.

The Full List of CBAA National Award Winners is below:

.