1a. Hong Kong's prison inmates yield good exam results. However none have yet tunnelled into a bank vault containing US$65 million, so there's a way to go.

1b. Proving both how smart and dumb Hong Kong is in one fell swoop, a "12 year old" got eight As and a C in the HKCEE exams.

2. Two mice were found on the Star Ferry yesterday but no-one did anything about it.

3. Strep suis, "pig flu", infected its 8th Hong Kong victim, a woman who had not travelled or had direct contact with live pigs but who had handled raw pork product.

4. But Hong Kong's paper of record, the SCMP, dedicates a front page column to....itself. More below the fold.

The article:

The South China Morning Post has won special praise for its Asian Tsunami coverage at the annual awards of the Asia-Pacific region's premier newspaper organisation. It was highly commended in the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association annual Newspaper of the Year Awards last night - and was also judged a clear winner in both of the awards' technical categories for excellence in printing and picture reproduction.

Panpa is the biggest industry association for Asia-Pacific papers, and with nearly 200 newspaper groups as members it takes in every major title in Asia, the Pacific and Australasia. Its annual awards, the most fiercely contested in Asia, were this year presented at the Australian tourism centre of Cairns.

The Post's entry for large-circulation papers featured its news reporting, Operation Santa Claus, which raised nearly $10 million for tsunami victims, and the special series "Asian Tsunami: Recovery and Rediscovery", reviewing progress of relief efforts 100 days on. The judges singled out the Post's entry for mention after that of the winner, Melbourne's Herald Sun, one of Australia's biggest and most successful tabloid papers.

A junket to sunny Cairns, the entry way to the Great Barrier Reef, for our intrepid SCMP crew. If you read the article closely (and why would you?), you will note they actually didn't win the award. Instead they deem themselves a close second to "one of Australia's biggest and most successful tabloid papers.

They also stressed the Post's pre-eminence in printing quality. "There was no contest: the Post was clearly superior to all other entries," they said. It is the second year in a row the paper has won the award for overall technical excellence in newspaper printing on a double-width press, and the fifth time in six years it has won for technical excellence in pre-print/supplement printed on a double-width press.

"Our success underlines both our commitment to quality journalism for the community we serve and our superlative printing standards in a highly competitive market," said David Armstrong, the Post's Director, Editorial.

They won two "technical" awards. It's like at the Oscars - these are the awards they don't broadcast on the main show because they're not that important or interesting.

Most newspapers indulge in this kind of back-patting and there are numerous awards for papers to award themselves. But most have the decency to tuck the article away on page.

Congrats to the SCMP.

posted by Simon on 08.11.05 at 10:51 AM in the