European Press Prize

The European Press Prize is an award programme for excellence in journalism across all 47 countries of Europe. It was founded in 2012 by seven European media foundations.[1]

Nominations open each year on November 1st and close on December 31st. The 2014 awards will be presented at the JP/Politiken headquarters in Copenhagen on April 13th 2015.

Mission and values

Good journalism is one of the hallmarks of civilised society. Brave journalism keeps freedom alive. Inquiring journalism is essential in a flourishing democracy. And thoughtful, open-minded journalism helps bind people of different outlooks together.

Stirring public debate, illuminating complex issues for readers through investigative journalism and holding the institutions of power to account have always been at the core of quality journalism. They must be the cornerstones of a future society and a dynamic democracy.

The European Press Prize reflects these aspirations. They are the initiative not just of media companies in one country or one commercial situation. They come from one of the most powerful forms of media ownership, which must, at root, count quality and public service as part of its challenge.

Seven foundations, all with strong media connections, have come together to start these awards – open to entries from all 47 countries of Europe as defined by Council of Europe membership. Their aim is simple: to salute and encourage journalism of the highest quality wherever it can be found in our continent. If journalism matters, then excellence matters. They hope to make these awards symbols for journalists and their readers right across the continent – and to show that the role of journalism itself is vital in informing healthy societies and helping nation to speak fruitfully to nation.

Founders

The European Press Prize was devised and founded in Amsterdam's cultural hub De Balie by the following people and foundations:

In 2015, The Irish Times Trust will join the European Press Prize.

The Board

Bureau

The Foundation’s Bureau for all organizational and administrative matters is based in Amsterdam. The Chief of Bureau is Thomas van Neerbos.

Categories

Awards will be given in four separate categories with prizes for each of €10,000:

From 2013 on, the judges will be empowered to award a special prize for particular excellence in editing or any other discipline, including reporting, feature write and advocacy.

In 2012 the awards were the following:

Preparatory Committee

Before the Jury sees the work, all of the submitted work is reviewed by a preparatory committee. It will start by evaluating all entries and preparing a shortlist comprised out of a maximum of six entries per category. The preparatory committee consists of :

Peter Preston was editor of the Guardian in London for twenty years. He is now co-director the Guardian Foundation. Before becoming editor, Preston worked as political reporter, war correspondent and daily columnist. Today, he writes a weekly page of media comment for the Observer. Preston served as world chairman of the International Press Institute and as chairman of the Association of British Editors. He has published two novels.

Heikelina Verrijn Stuart is a lawyer, philosopher of law and journalist. She has worked as broadcaster for Dutch radio and television and for Dutch daily and weekly newspapers. As a correspondent she covered the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court and the other international courts for Dutch media, the Belgian network VRT, the BBC and the International Justice Tribune. She was director of the Clara Wichmann Institute for Women and Law in Amsterdam. She is currently working on a book about the workings of the Peace Palace. She widely published on criminal law, international law and subjects as revenge, reconciliation and forgiveness in Dutch and international publications and books. Verrijn Stuart is a member or chair of several Dutch advisory bodies on international affairs, human rights, the restitution of art looted during the Second World War, and the commemoration of WW II. She is member of the board of Stichting Democratie and Media.

A press freedom enthusiast, Patrice started his publishing career as a journalist reporting from conflicts in Central Asia at the end of the 1980s. Before being involved in media development as Chief Strategy Officer of the Media Development Investment Fund, he held the responsibilities of Managing Director of Netscape Europe, a Principal for the World Economic Forum (The Davos Annual Meeting) and Deputy Managing Director at Lagardère Active – the leading French publishing group and owner of ELLE, PREMIERE and other internationally renowned magazines. Schneider has also worked as a Director at the World Association of Newspapers in Paris.

Timothy Large is Editor-in-Chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the world’s leading provider of news and information. He is responsible for four global news services run by the Foundation: AlertNet, the world’s humanitarian news site, The Emergency Information Service (EIS) for disaster-affected populations, TrustLaw, a global hub of news and information on anti-corruption, women’s rights and free legal assistance and Trust.org, the Foundation’s portal site. Before joining the Foundation in 2003 he was a correspondent for Reuters News in Tokyo, a staff writer for a major Japanese daily newspaper and news editor of a popular online science magazine. As a freelance journalist he has written widely on humanitarian themes, social issues, economics, science, literature and the arts. He is a passionate photojournalist. He has a First Class degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and in 1997 was a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholar in Tokyo.

Uffe Riis Soerensen is member of the board of the Jyllands-Posten Foundation. He started his career in journalism as a trainee with the local Danish newspaper Dannevirke-Hejmdal. In the seventies, eighties and nineties he worked with a number of newspapers as a reporter and editor, managing editor and editor-in-chief. From 1999 – 2004 he was editor-in-chief, of the Aalborg Stiftstidende in Northern Jutland. From 2004 until his retirement in 2008 he was editor-in-chief and CEO of the Danish news agency Ritzau’s Bureau. He still writes as a columnist. Uffe has held and still holds a number of positions in international organizations of news agencies, most recently as General Secretary of the News Agencies World Congress and the News Agencies Council.

Konstanty Gebert (Warsaw, 1953) taught psychology at the Medical Academy in Warsaw from 1979-1983. His career in journalism started after the military coup in 1981, when he worked as an editor and columnist for several underground publications, using the pen name Dawid Warszawiski. He was also closely connected to Solidarność. In 1989 he joined the new independent daily Gazeta Wyborcza as a columnist and international reporter, writing about the Middle East, the Balkans, human rights and international humanitarian law, and Jewish issues. He has worked with independent media in Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans, Africa and Latin America. His collected essays, newspaper articles and columns were published in Poland and worldwide. Gebert is an expert in Jewish history. He has been, and still is actively involved in several organizations or publications to do with Jewish issues or Jewish-Polish relations, either as a (co)-founder, scholar, advisor or board member. He teaches Polish-Jewish relations at universities in Poland and the United States and wrote eleven books. In 1995, Gebert was co-founder of the MDIF and served as its vice-chair from 1995-2000. He is still a MDIF media consultant. Since 2011 he is Senior Policy Fellow and head of the Warsaw office at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

Jury

The jury will be chaired by Sir Harold Evans, editor-at-large of Thomson Reuters and the former editor of the Sunday Times, and the other members of the jury are Sylvie Kauffmann, former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and also board member of the Global Editors Network, Yevgenia Albats, editor-in-chief of the Russian New Times, Juan Luis Cebrián, the founding editor of El Pais in Madrid and CEO of the Prisa media groep and Jørgen Ejbøl, vice-chairman of the Jyllands-Posten Foundation[2]

Sir Harold Evans is one of Britain’s most famous and feted editors. He first edited the Northern Echo in Darlington before moving to edit the Sunday Times in London for 14 years, where his campaigns – for example, on behalf of thalidomide victims – made headlines and helped change laws. He was briefly editor of The Times thereafter, before moving to the United States, where he has served as publisher at Random House and editorial director of several publications, including US News and World Report. He is a noted historian of American life and a world authority on newspaper design techniques. Sir Harold is currently editor-at-large for Reuters.

Sylvie Kaufmann is editorial director of the French newspaper Le Monde, of which she was editor in chief in 2010-2011. Previously, she was the deputy editor and a reporter-at-large in Asia, based in Singapore. Kaufmann joined Le Monde in 1988 as its Moscow correspondent. Next, as Eastern and Central Europe correspondent, she covered the collapse of the Soviet empire and the subsequent political and economic changes in the Eastern European countries. She then moved to the United States, first as Washington correspondent and then as New York bureau chief. She also covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as reporter-at-large. Kauffmann then headed the in-depth reporting section of Le Monde.

Yevgenia Albats was the first Soviet journalist to investigate the Soviet political police, the KGB in the Soviet-era. She is the author of The State Within A State: KGB and Its Hold on Russia. In 1989, she received the Golden Pen Award, the highest journalism honour in the then-Soviet Union. She was an Alfred Friendly fellow in 1990 and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993 and worked freelance for the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and the CNN bureau in Moscow. She has a PhD in political science from Harvard University and teaches at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics University. Albats is the author of four books and currently is Editor in Chief and CEO of the Moscow-based political weekly The New Times, one of the few independent media outlets in the current Russia. She is also a talk show host for two Russian networks.

Juan Luis Cebrián is the founding editor of El Pais in Madrid and CEO of the Prisa media groep. He founded El Pais in 1976, after graduating from the school for journalism and finishing his studies in philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. As editor of El Pais he played an important role in Spain’s development from a dictatorship to a democracy. In his fifty years in journalism, he has won many prizes, among others the International Editor of the Year Award from the World Press Review in New York (1980), the Premio Nacional de Periodismo de España – Spain’s National Press Journalism Award (1983) and the Freedom of Expression Medal from the F. D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Foundation (1860). He is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, a member of the board of Le Monde and a writer.

Jørgen Ejbøl started his career in journalism with the Aalborg Stiftstidende newspaper. From 1976-1993 he served as editor and editor-in-chief on various newspapers in Denmark such as Fyens Amts Avis, Dagbladet, Weekendavisen Berlingske Aften, BT, Billed Bladet, and Berlingske Tidende. From 1991-1993 he was editor-in-chief and managing director of JydskeVestkysten. In 1993, Ejbøl became editor-in-chief and managing director with Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, followed, in 2003, by his appointment as chairman of the board of JP/Politiken Newspapers Ltd., (Jyllands-Posten, Politiken and Ekstra Bladet). As of 2008, he is Vice Chairman of the Jyllands-Posten Foundation. From 2005 Ejbøl has held managerial positions in several media organizations in Denmark and abroad, like APM Print & Trans Press, (Belgrade, Serbia & Montenegro), Alta Press, Barnaul, (Russia) and Sermitsiak.AG (Denmark/Greenland). From 2005-2008 Ejbøl was a member of the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize. From 2005-2011 The Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute.

Winners 2012

In the Editing category, the Award was won by Ihor Pochynok, Chief Editor of ‘Express’ a daily newspaper published in Lviv in the Ukraine. Express is a prime example of a local newspaper becoming the opinion leader of its region and assuming at times a national role. Unabashedly political, though not connected to any of the parties, Express went on the barricades during the Orange Revolution, but had no hesitation in criticising the incompetence and corruption of the Yushchenko-Timoshenko government which ensued. It has made enemies in all Ukrainian governments, frequently facing demands to assume a less critical stance – but nevertheless breaking investigative stories that shrug off such pressure.

In the Commentator category, the Award went to Nikos Chrysoloras from Greece, for his article ‘Why Greece must remain in the Eurozone’, published in papers across Europe. Chrysoloras, the Brussels correspondent for the Greek daily Kathimerini, made a passionate plea for his country to stay in the Eurozone. Analysing the supposed reasons for Greece’s current financial and economic woes, he denounced the call for a Greek exit by ‘pundits, the broadsheet press columnists and experts … who claim to know the remedy for a country which they have rarely, if ever, visited and who have no knowledge of its economic and social history’.

In the News Reporting category, the Award was won by three reporters from Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, Orla Borg, Carsten Ellegaard Christensen and Morten Pihl for their groundbreaking investigative reporting project on Morten Storm, a former agent of the Danish Secret Service. In a series of articles, they exposed how Storm helped the CIA locate Al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who was subsequently killed by an American drone attack in Yemen. The story received wide coverage in the U.S. and Europe and fed a crucial debate on the role of European countries in the U.S. ‘war on terror.’ Simply, when is it right for states and their agents to kill?

In the Innovation category, the Award went to Paul Lewis from the United Kingdom, Special Projects Editor of The Guardian in London, for his project ‘Reading the Riots’. Together with Professor Tim Newburn from the London School of Economics and 30 researchers, Lewis launched a year-long research study into the causes of the summer riots in England in 2011. He analysed the mechanisms which led to both the violence and its rapid spread from the capital to other major towns and cities in Britain. It seriously questioned many assumptions about the riots, from the role of social media to the involvement of criminal gangs. Combining investigative journalism and scientific methodology, Lewis developed a unique new approach to investigative journalism, which may prove to become a powerful weapon for other journalists attempting to uncover increasingly complex and sophisticated social developments.

Winners 2013

In 2013 Steve Stecklow, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati received the Investigative Award for “Assets of the Ayatollah”, published by Reuters, United Kingdom.

In 2013 the Distinguished Writing Award went to Sergey Khazov for his pieces “Forbidden Islam”, “Vietnam Town” and “The man in orange”, published by The New Times magazine, Russian Federation.

The Commentator Award went to Boris Dežulović in 2013 for his piece “Vukovar: a Life-Size Monument to the Dead City”", published by Globus, Croatia.

The Innovation Award of 2013 went to Espen Sandli, Linn Kongsli Hillestad and Ola Strømman for their piece “Null CTRL”, published by Dagbladet, Norway.

In 2013 Yavuz Baydar received the Special Award for his work as ombudsman. His columns were censored. The award is a symbol of support for his fight for free press. In the same year Editor Alan Rusbridger from the Guardian and editor Wolfgang Buchner from Der Spiegel also received a special award for their persistence and courage in publishing the NSA stories.

References

  1. ↑ Greenslade, Roy (24 May 2012). "Media foundations launch European Press Prize". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
  2. ↑ "Mediehuse stifter europæisk Pulitzer-pris" (in Danish). Politiken. Retrieved 2012-05-28.

External links