Your campaign wins major award
David Moroney • Published 23 Apr 2010 14:00
THE Greenock Telegraph has won a top national journalism award.
Your anti-knife crime campaign - Stop Knives Save Lives - was named Campaign of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards last night.
Editor Wendy Metcalfe was presented with the award by former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, George Reid, at a ceremony in Glasgow.
Mr Reid, the jury chairman of the awards, praised the paper for the sustained campaign and said it was 'exactly the sort of campaign a local paper should be involved in'.
Mrs Metcalfe said: "We are thrilled the success of our Stop Knives Save Lives campaign has been acknowledged with such a high honour. The success is in no small part down to the hundreds of you who backed us from day one.
"And this major drive to rid our streets of blades could not have been done without the partnership with campaigner John Muir.
"But the real success will be in the coming months when we will be urging MSPs to vote in favour of toughening knife crime laws.
"This would mean all of the objectives set out by you at our Inverclyde Knife Crime Conference would be achieved."
The Telegraph's blitz on blades was sparked by the appalling murder of Greenock man Damian Muir.
The Tele stood shoulder to shoulder with Damian's dad, John Muir, and spotlighted his petition for 'Damian's Law' - a new sentencing policy for knife carriers, which eventually attracted over 15,000 signatures.
We championed Mr Muir all the way to the Scottish Parliament and helped him expose and close a dangerous legal loophole relating to the possession of knives in common closes.We were then the only newspaper in Scotland whose editor was invited to a special debate at Holyrood into knife crime in January 2009.
The Tele then held a public summit to discuss the scourge of blades.
The Inverclyde Knife Crime Conference saw over 600 readers pack Greenock Town Hall to hear from - and challenge - our top table of senior legal figures, police officers, knife crime victims and medics in a three- hour debate.
Our readers wanted more consistent sentences and a hard-hitting anti-knife education drive in our schools.
We delivered a dossier to the influential Justice and Public Petitions committees at Holyrood and kept up the pressure by bringing Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill through to Greenock in a landmark visit.
We ensured he met a series of people who have lost loved ones, or had their own lives changed forever by knife crime. Just two months later, in a major coup, Mr MacAskill was back to announce a flagship Scottish Government educational drive against knives, which Inverclyde would lead for the whole of Scotland.
The new £500,000 initiative was run as a pilot in Inverclyde before being rolled out across the country and it was supported with extensive coverage in the Tele, proving a huge success in our schools.
Within weeks, two of the political parties had thrown their weight behind our community's calls for tougher sentencing - with Labour and the Conservatives demanding mandatory sentences for blade carrying thugs.
That bid is still running, with D-day looming at Holyrood and knife sentencing now at the heart of the political debate in Scotland.
We have also teamed up with Crimestoppers to launch our Stop Knives Save Lives sticker initiative this year.
This article appeared in Greenock Telegraph 23 Apr 10
Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our News archives.
