New Narratives team at EL PAÍS takes top prize at Malofiej awards for Covid-19 feature

The New Narratives team at EL PAÍS has won the top prize at the Malofiej Awards, which are viewed as the Pulitzer Prize of infographics. The awards highlight the best journalistic infographic work published during the previous year. The “Best of Show Digital” category has been won by the feature article “A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air,” created by journalists Mariano Zafra and Javier Salas.

The article, which was published in October of last year, has become the most-viewed content in EL PAÍS history, with more than 12 million readers its original Spanish version, and more than seven million in English. The feature uses visual narratives in a simple way to explain how health measures can stop the spread of the coronavirus in three different everyday situations.

The article drew praise from a number of international experts, and last month it also won the Best Multimedia category at the prestigious Ortega y Gasset Journalism Awards. The jury at the prizes stated that the article had “not just changed lives, it also saved them,” adding: “At a time when the transmission [of the coronavirus] via aerosols was not being recounted efficiently, [the article] was of huge assistance to millions of readers. It is, what’s more, the perfect expression of public-service journalism, which helps to make decisions.”

As well as this prize, EL PAÍS has also won three more Malofiej awards: a gold and a silver for the same feature, as well as a bronze for “ccu cgg cgg gca The 12 letters that changed the world,” an article explaining how the genome of the new coronavirus makes it so infectious. The authors were Manuel Ansede, Artur Galocha and Mariano Zafra.

The Malojief are awarded at an event organized by the Spanish chapter of the Society for News Design (SND-E) and the Navarre University’s Communication Faculty. At the edition this year, 171 media organizations from 32 countries presented their work. OF the 1,144 entries, 399 were in the printed graphics category and 709 in the digital infographics categories.

English version by Simon Hunter.