ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Rudaw fans who engage with the broadcaster’s various platforms in several languages received news of its award for social media engagement with joy on Wednesday.
Rudaw won the award for best social media engagement for the year 2017 as part of the 13th WAN-IFRA Middle East Conference in Dubai.
“I choose different sources to get a good opinion about any topic. But Rudaw is the first, always the first,” an English-speaking teacher based in Erbil told Rudaw. “They cover the news the quickest, their information is pretty much reliable.”
Avin, a director for an American school based in the Kurdistan Region, said she, as an American Kurd, relies on Rudaw for news and events in the region.
She said Rudaw English has given English-speaking expats the opportunity to keep on top of developments.
“I actually rely on it [Rudaw English] to understand what is going on in Kurdistan, because there are a very limited number of English-news channels [to help] us to understand … so almost every day, I have to check it several times in order to understand,” she said.
The five departments of Rudaw social media, working across two shifts, cover events in four languages, including the two Kurdish dialects of Sorani and Kurmanji.
“It is very important for us, regarding the events happening in the Kurdistan Region and the four countries where Kurds live, that we are first to tweet, alongside detailed reports with relevant links,” said Osamah Golpy, desk manager at Rudaw English.
“We have also focused on Facebook, especially during the fight for Mosul. We produced videos and shared others live. And then again during the [Kurdish] referendum. These two events were very important for us and we engaged with a great number of fans.”
Darbaz Saleh, editor of Rudaw’s Kurdish Sorani service, described 2017 as a year of achievements.
“2017 was the year of unprecedented achievement for Rudaw online. In terms of digital readership, we came at the top both in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq,” he said.
“In terms of social media, many times, especially during the Mosul offensive, the Kurdish referendum and the October 16 events, Rudaw’s social media surpassed that of major media outlets like the BBC, Sky News Arabic and Al Jazeera.”
Rudaw Media Network began broadcasting on May 29, 2013. The 24-hour broadcaster launched under the slogan ‘unchallenged.' It soon broke out of the Kurdistan Region to become an influential media player in the region and around the world.
Rudaw has 10 pages on social media with about 10 million followers altogether — on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram and even on Viber, Saleh said: “We have special phone applications for the [four] languages with one million subscribers.”
Yasamin Bashar, an Arab teacher, said she visited the headquarters of Rudaw Media Network based in Erbil as part of a field visit to experience the work of news makers.
“We came to the conclusion that it [Rudaw] is a well-established organization, not an organization aimed only at making profits, but also to spread awareness,” she said. She also acknowledged the speed of news production on Rudaw platforms.
