MyBroadband’s Wikus Steyn wins national Journalist of the Year award

MyBroadband’s Wikus Steyn has won the coveted national Vodacom Journalist of the Year award in the innovation category.

The award follows two weeks after Steyn won the Innovation Journalist of the Year award in the Gauteng region.

The annual Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards, now in its twenty-second year, pays tribute to exceptional journalism in South Africa.

Steyn won the Journalist of the Year award for his comprehensive mobile network quality testing project and reporting.

As part of the project, he travelled over 10,000 kilometres, made 93,912 calls, and recorded over 41,000 call minutes.

The data was then processed to provide accurate results on industry regulator Icasa’s standards, including:

• Average Call Setup Success Ratio (CSSR)
• Average Dropped Call Ratio (DCR)
• Average Call Setup Time (CST)
• Average Speech Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS)

The results showed how each mobile operator performed in a region to assist them in improving in areas where they failed Icasa’s standards.

He published the results in a series of articles and shared the information with other media houses, which also reported the findings.

The judges appreciated Steyn using innovative investigative techniques to cover a largely underreported story.

This award followed MyBroadband editor Jan Vermeulen winning the investigative journalism category in 2020 for his probe into IP address theft.

In June, MyBroadband journalist Myles Illidge was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards for his reporting on the Department of Justice’s ransomware attack.

Vermeulen thanked Vodacom for their recognition and support of quality journalism and for playing their role in advancing the sector.

He also thanked the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards judges for taking the time to judge this very technical investigation.