Since 1971, the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) has recognized outstanding achievements in electronic journalism with the Murrow Awards. It flew hundreds of kilometres from Washington and landed at Dhaka Airport on 26 December 2021. Unfortunately, it took a long time to pay the customs fee and solve other issues, including FedEx‘s lack of cooperation. Even so, I am delighted to receive the award.

I am grateful to Kate Beddall, my managing editor, for taking the initiative to collect a copy of the award from RTDNA and send it to Bangladesh. At the same time, I’d want to thank all of my colleagues at BenarNews and Radio Free Asia (RFA). Above all, I’d want to dedicate this recognition to the COVID volunteers, for whose great efforts we were able to create the story.

Kate Beddall and Ashif Entaz Rabi

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic when physically collecting news was in despair, my producer Ashif Entaz Rabi‘s brainstormed idea seemed auspicious, and I learned a new kind of video storytelling. We are currently working as comrades in BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Our first story was about the Eid celebrations of a family with multiple COVID patients and the second was about doctors fighting against corona-virus in Bangladesh. Then in the same way we told stories about funeral volunteers and nurses. In these cases, the front-liners and the covid patients have provided us with footages of their respective fields through WhatsApp or We-transfer. And I took the interviews via Skype. Then Rabi Bhai edited those and prepared the final output. 

Earlier with the same strategy, we made two video stories about Bangladeshis stuck in lockdown in Dhaka and other important cities of the world without any pre-planning. However, the planned video stories were tidier. Each story was well-received by Bangladeshi and international audiences, and their feedbacks have inspired us. 

Following that, we have got institutional recognition this time. For the first time, our story – “Bangladeshi Volunteers Bury ‘Abandoned’ COVID-19 Dead” has been nominated as a finalist at the 2021 New York Festivals TV & Film Awards. On their website on June 9, the festival authority said, the 2021 TV & Film Awards Grand Jury members comprised of award-winning international broadcast and film executives selected this year’s Finalists from leading-edge content submitted from over 40 countries.

I’ve never had any of my work recognized in this way before. I was speechless after receiving a lot of well-wishes and congratulations. This emotion became familiar to me 17 years after I began journalism at the grassroots level as a youngster. At the beginning of each year I get irritated with myself as I know me very well. For the same reason I become optimistic about future. It is a must for everybody to have a vision of his own faults and deviations clearly. But we forget to reflect due to self-defeating consciousness and the daily much ado. I think it’s better to be upset enough to pivot and revise ourselves.