RT’S #1917LIVE PROJECT AND MULTIMEDIA NEWS AGENCY RUPTLY HONORED AT DRUM ONLINE MEDIA AWARDS

MOSCOW, MAY 28, 2018—Ruptly, RT’s global multimedia news agency, has won “Commercial Team of the Year” at the annual Drum Online Media Awards, a prestigious international competition for online journalism.

Ruptly LIVE was Highly Commended for “Technical Innovation of the Year” and the RT team behind the historical social media reenactment #1917LIVE was Highly Commended as “Social Media Team of the Year”.

Ruptly was chosen as the Commercial Team of the Year over Quartz and Minute Media, after demonstrating impressive growth in its international client base.

“We are keen to be able to scale a global agency in a collaborative process, and we are proud that our team has been recognized for commercial awards which shows our daily hard work to provide news that expands views across multiple platforms,” Chief Commercial Officer Matthew Tabaccos said. “The award gives Ruptly confirmation that we are growing the agency in the right way, by spending time with clients, listening across markets to their individual needs .”

Ruptly LIVE, a platform that enables publishers to license and instantly stream up to 9 simultaneous live events direct to social media, including 360 live video, was Highly Commended in the “Technical Innovation of the Year” category alongside The Telegraph, beating out projects by Facebook, CNN, and Harrods.

Ruptly was launched by RT in 2013. Today its materials are used by more than 1,000 media companies from 89 countries — from major TV channels to online projects and mobile platforms. Ruptly videos have appeared on air and online for news outlets such as CNN, NBC, CBS, and VICE. In 2017, Ruptly was awarded the Drum Online Media award for “Best News B2B Site”, and its project Ruptly LIVE was short-listed for the Global Media Innovator Award.

The RT team behind the #1917LIVE project, a large-scale “real-time” Twitter re-enactment of the Russian Revolution was Highly Commended in the category “Social Media Team of the Year”. RT’s team was recognized over teams from The Independent, The Daily Mirror, Channel 4 news, BBC News, ITV, and DW.

RT’s #1917LIVE project is one of the biggest-ever historical re-enactments on Twitter. Dozens of Twitter accounts were set up as key historical characters of the period, from the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin to common workers and soldiers, tweeting events from 100 years ago in real-time. Historians from the US and UK took part in the project, as well as the world-renowned Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. The project received 20 Russian and international awards, including the 2018 Webby People’s Voice Award. At the Shorty Social Good Awards, the project won for ‘Best in Education’ and won gold for ‘Best Overall Twitter Presence.’

In April 2018, the same team behind #1917LIVE launched #Romanovs100 to bring the story of Russia’s last royal family to life through thousands of Romanov family photographs, which were recently unearthed from within the national archives. The large-scale, cross-platform multimedia project takes place across four platforms – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – in order to retell the last decades of imperial Russia over the 100 days leading up to the centenary of the family’s execution on July 17.

The Drum Online Media Awards is a prestigious international awards competition honoring the most outstanding achievements in online journalism. This is the competition’s eighth year.