In a surprising announcement, the Radical Beer Tribune (RBT) has won the highest amount of $1900 in the AMS annual Voter Funded Media (VFM) contest.

“I was surprised. This is an interesting datum in the evolution of VFM theory, and I think it begets further analysis of the voting system,” said RBT blogger Matthew Naylor. “I don’t necessarily think I presented the same kind of quality of information to the populus as perhaps a blog like UBC Insiders.”

UBC Spectator took second with $1800, Social Capital took third with $1600 and UBC Insiders took $1200. AMS Confidential took fifth place with $1000 and Geoff’s Place came in last, winning $500.

“I think it’s awesome,” said Justin Yang, a blogger for UBC Spectator, on their second-place finish. “This year, there was a lot of competition and I’m just happy that we did as well as we did.

“It was a whole team effort,” he continued. “Having Mitch join us was a huge boost because he took over the slack….We had a very strong team and I think that was the win.”

Jason Ng from Social Capital said that they took a different approach than UBC Spectator and Insiders, which he feels contributed to their third-place finish.

“Some of the issues we highlighted were AMS clubs and international [students] at UBC,” he said. “We tried to focus more on specific issues that other students might be interested in that might not be the usual issues that are focused on for an AMS election.”

However, some were disappointed. “[I was] shocked at first. I think you’ll find a pretty wide consensus that, not to toot my own horn, Insiders provided the most analysis, considering we published on every single referendum question and on every single race, including the boring ones,” said UBC Insiders editor Alex Lougheed.

“At the end of the day, the goal of the blog was to change the debate, and we did that, I think, to inform the voters about what they’re doing. Results aside, I’m happy with how we did.”

Upon asked if he won because his blog has “beer” in the title, Naylor responded, “It could be that, or it could be that every single person I endorsed except for Natalie won, so it could be an ideological alignment with the campus.”

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