Wall Street Journal takes home Best in Show in INMA Global Media Awards

DALLAS (7 May 2026) -INMA today announced 41 first-place recipients at its 2026 Global Media Awards competition, with The Wall Street Journal taking home the global "Best in Show."

Click here to see complete list of winners

During an emotion-filled awards ceremony at the Tipi am Kanzleramt in Berlin in front of more than 425 guests, the winners were unveiled across 20 categories aimed at surfacing innovation and best practices in news brands, optimising the use of media features, subscriptions, product, advertising and commerce, and newsroom transformation.

Winning the coveted "Best in Show," the top award of the evening, was The Wall Street Journal's "Surfacing the Story: How WSJ's ORCA Unlocks the Podcast Universe," a powerful investigative journalism tool that turns an unsearchable podcast ecosystem into structured, analysable data, enabling reporters to track narratives, sources, and influence across thousands of hours of audio with accountability built into the system.

The 2026 Global Media Awards competition attracted a record 960 entries from 274 market-leading news media brands in 46 countries. Participants included newspaper media, magazine media, digital media, television media, and radio media.

An international jury of 60 media executives from 26 countries selected 200 finalists in March.

Judges also selected the best in six world regions from the finalists:

• Best in Africa: Media24 for "Saturday Night Fitness"
• Best in Asia/Pacific: ACM/Explore for "From Destination Site to Network Product"
• Best in Europe: Bauer Media for "Toni OS & Eva AI"
• Best in Latin America: Clarín for "Mile 201: Patrolling the World's Most Contested Maritime Frontier"
• Best in North America: The Wall Street Journal for "Surfacing the Story: How WSJ's ORCA Unlocks the Podcast Universe"
• Best in South Asia: Dainik Jagran for "Lights. Cities. Action."

• "It is clear from this year's winning INMA entries that AI has graduated from experiment to strategic operating fabric, and the linear subscription funnel has given way to integrated audience systems focused on lifetime value rather than acquisition alone," said Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director and CEO of INMA.

  "Just as importantly, our members are pairing this business sophistication with a renewed commitment to immersive, human-centric, and local journalism. In a year defined by misinformation and fractured public discourse, news media organisations are proving that strategic depth and editorial purpose are not competing priorities - they reinforce each other."

  The deadline for the 2027 INMA Global Media Awards is January 29, 2027.