Our heartiest congratulations to recent MCM graduate, Jeremy Boo, 21, who was revealed on Nov 19 as the only Asian among 5 winners of the Young Reporter Competition organised by the International Committee of Red Cross. Jeremy is doing his National Service.
He stands in very good company as two of the other winners are professional journalists, another is a Law graduate from the University of London and a fourth an undergraduate in Mexico City who has been actively involved in the British Council's Global Changemakers. Almost 500 entries were received for the competition organised to celebrate the International Year of the Youth.
Jeremy's win will give him a chance to cover, for a week, youths who live in one of five areas of armed conflict where there is ICRC presence. These are Georgia, Lebanon, Liberia, the Philippines and Senegal. The winners then get to go to Geneva next May to report what they have learnt.
Jeremy's winning story on the people living in Manila's urban slums, was coaxed out of him for the competition by his lecturer Robin Yee, who had organised a journalism study trip to Manila for Mass Communication students.
Before the trip, Robin had brought a team of student journalists, including Jeremy, to meet with Reader's Digest to pitch possible feature stories they could cover. Impressed by Jeremy's tenacity and sacrifice at going after a dangerous story, and his fine writing skills, already evident when he was the main student editor of theurbanwire.com, Robin persuaded him to send in Home, which you can read here:
http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/2010-11-19-young-reporters-event.htm