FinanceAsia won two awards on Wednesday for reporting on private equity as well as for editorial comment.
Jame DiBiasio, editorial director of Haymarket Financial Media, was a finalist for Journalist of the Year for reporting on alternative investments at the State Street Institutional Journalism Awards, Asia Pacific.
His pieces on Indonesian private equity appeared on financeasia.com in August, 2013, including one on KKR’s deal for TPS, and on private equity’s interest in Indonesian targets.
DiBiasio was also a finalist for the award for best editorial comment, for his editorials during an interim period when he served as editor of FinanceAsia. In the March 2013 edition of the magazine, his editorial “No room for bonus refugees” argued that the notion of a wave of disgruntled financial professionals abandoning the West for Hong Kong and Singapore is fantasy.
And in June, in his editorial “Running out of room”, he argued that central banking quantitative easing in the US and Japan has become counterproductive, an prescient view in light of the Federal Reserve’s subsequent decision not to begin tapering its asset purchases.
Haymarket Financial Media’s other publications, AsianInvestor and The Corporate Treasurer, also won awards.
DiBiasio, the former editor of AsianInvestor, was named Journalist of the Year for pensions issues. Hugo Cox, a contributing writer to AsianInvestor, was named Journalist of the Year for investments (and DiBiasio was named a runner-up). Elva Muk, a reporter on AsianInvestor, was runner-up for the pensions category. And Dan Bland, reporter at The Corporate Treasurer, was a finalist for an award recognizing the best newcomer to journalism.
This is the second year these awards have been held in Asia. The judges received nearly 70 submissions from publications in Hong Kong, mainland China and Australia. The entries were judged by an independent panel of industry professionals, led by Tom Leander, Asia editor-in-chief at Lloyd’s List. He says the awards “honour the best work in a field that is decidedly undercovered, and needs more attention and accountability. They encourage deeper understanding of an often opaque field of financial endeavour. They highlight how all journalists should best cover these markets, and raise the bar.”
