Kinshasa VICE

The winners of the 2012 Webby Awards were recently announced. Spoiler alert: I didn't win. Also I never bothered to nominate myself.
The full list of winners is viewable here, but let's skip to two categories in particular,  'Documentary- Individual Episode' and 'News and Politics- Individual Episode'. We linked to one of the Documentary nominees back in December, VICE'S report on bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, with Thomas Morton reporting.

That didn't win. VICE did, however, take the News and Politics trophy, for this report by Jason Mojica and photographer Tim Freccia, profiling life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In case it's not clear, if you don't know about VICE yet, they're putting out some amazing stuff. The tone is pretty much 'Cracked.com's hard news division', so expect that- there's a 'NSFW' section and everything (spend enough time at VICE and, let's face it, you will see naked boobies)- but if that's not an issue for you, you'll see some outstanding reports if you're willing to dig through the odd college-student-ranting-type article and gratuitous set of boobs to get to them.

For example, taking from recent reports, here's Paige Aarhus reporting on a Kenyan secessionist movement. Here's Sharif Elhelwa filing a report after noticing an Al-Qaeda flag (yes, they have a flag) flying over a courthouse in Benghazi, Libya. Here's Andy Capper reporting on the homeless situation in Barcelona. (Capper in particular is pretty much VICE in a nutshell. If you look through his most recent stuff, it includes the Barcelona report, as well as several pieces containing graphic material from violence in Nigeria and interviews with ex-Liberian warlord Joshua Blahyi, and then further down you have quite a few contributions to the NSFW section.)

But back to the Webbys. The story that did win the Documentary prize comes from the Guardian, called 'Abandon The Knife'. The story concerns Kenyan girls who are fighting back against the long-standing practice of female circumcision. As a reward for winning, it is presented below. It's 32 minutes, so spare some time.