The Exeter Express and Echo has beaten worldwide competition to win an award from the World Association of Newspapers for its Green Shoppers environmental campaign.
The Northcliffe Media title beat off worldwide competition to secure a Young Readers’ Award for its campaigning efforts in giving away free re-useable bags.
Echo editor Marc Astley said: ‘We are thrilled with this latest award for the Green Shoppers campaign. For a newspaper the size of ours to receive such an accolade is akin to Exeter City winning a World Cup game.”
Astley will collect the award, which is given for the best project or activity aimed at developing young readership, at WAN’s Digital Publishing Conference and Expo in Amsterdam in October.
The paper gave out thousands of cloth bags to shoppers and got schoolchildren involved in designing a Christmas-themed bag and a children’s book bag.
The WAN prize comes after the paper successfully met its campaign target to cut the number of plastic bags in Exeter by 25 per cent. The Echo was also nominated in the niche publication category in the Newspaper Society’s advertising, digital and media awards for its Spring Green Shoppers supplement.
The Echo’s award was one of several annual Young Reader Awards given by WAN with this year’s top prize going to Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
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