2003 - 04 Annual Report - Sbs

29AUDIENCE RESEARCHAWARDSSBS Radio continued to survey its listeners to ensure thatits services meet their needs and expectations.The year’s first round of surveys showed that speakersof Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bosnian continueto listen in large numbers. The independent surveysby McNair Ingenuity Research showed that two out ofthree Macedonian speakers in Australia listened to SBSRadio during the week and 70% of Bosnian speakers inMelbourne tune in to the weekly program.Since the surveys began in 1996, SBS Radio hascommissioned 60 surveys across 41 languages, involvingmore than 25,000 telephone interviews. These are themost intensive and extensive independent listener surveysconducted by any broadcaster in Australia.The Executive Producer of the Arabic language program,Majida Abboud received an award from the AustralianLebanese Association of NSW in recognition of hercontribution to the success and achievements of youth.She was also acknowledged for outstanding andpioneering work in radio by the Muslim Women’s NationalNetwork of Australia.The Arabic language program’s Senior Producer, MarieMyssy was honoured by the Eastern Sydney MulticulturalAccess Project for her contribution to health and nutritionawareness.The Korean language program won First Prize at theInternational Radio Program Competition hosted by theKorean Broadcasting System in Seoul.Although each language community is unique, overthe years the surveys have provided a vast reservoir ofinformation on listening habits. The results, extrapolatedacross Australia, suggest that each week SBS Radioprograms are heard by approximately 890,000 listenerswho speak a language other than English in the home.By June 2004, surveys were underway (for the third time)in Italian, Greek, Vietnamese and Mandarin and (for thefourth time) in Cantonese and Arabic. Together, these sixlanguage communities comprise almost half of the threemillion Australians who speak a language other thanEnglish in the home.Georgios Diamandoulis, a Senior Producer with the Greeklanguage program, won a Greek Government Award forthe Best Radio Report by a Greek journalist abroad. TheAward was for a segment titled ‘Youth and Politics’ whichwas broadcast in the Greek youth program.Newsroom journalists, Sacha Payne and Michael Kenny,were both honoured with awards. Sacha won the J.D.Pringle award which saw her travel to the UK to producea series on Britain’s refugee policies. Michael won ascholarship from the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre for astudy tour of Indonesia, from which he produced a fourpartseries examining the nature of religion in the world’slargest Muslim nation.