We are very happy and proud that the European Press Prize has decided to have its 2021 award ceremony at Dataharvest – the European Investigative Journalism Conference.
The prizes will be announced on Thursday June 3 at 12 noon – the second last days of this year’s online Dataharvest Conference. After the announcement of the winners, each project will be presented and discussed, moderated by the director for Arena for Journalism in Europe, Brigitte Alfter.
Five awards will be given:
- The Innovation Award
- The Distinguished Reporting Award
- The Investigative Reporting Award
- The Opinion Award
- The Special Award
The panel of judges of the European Press Prize are Sylvie Kauffmann (Le Monde), Alan Rusbridger (former editor of The Guardian), Alexandra Föderl-Schmid (Süddeutsche Zeitung), Sheila Sitalsing (freelance/de Volkskrant) and Juan Luis Sánchez (eldiario.es).
Candidates for the prizes can come from all 47 countries in the Council of Europe. The prizes can be given to teams of journalists or individuals. Each award is for 10,000 euros, to be spent on a project that may enrich the practice of journalism.
This year, over one thousand pieces of journalistic work were submitted for the prizes, so there was a lot of reading for the preparatory committee, before they announced shortlists of 5 candidates in each category.
We asked the European Press Prize coordinator Aylin Özalp what distinguishes this prize from other journalistic awards:
“It is the only Europe-wide journalistic prize out there. There are global and national prizes elsewhere, but this is the only one that crosses all European borders. It is also very special that people can enter their articles in their original languages. We translate everything that goes into the longlist and later the shortlist into English. It takes away quite some barriers for journalists who do not write in English.”
Why did you decide to have the award ceremony in cooperation with Arena and Dataharvest?
“We are longtime friends of the Dataharvest conference. It is a conference that we always visit, be it live or as last year online, because we see that our laureates – and sometimes potential laureates – also attend this festival. Here is a big bunch of talented people who are exploring new methods together. The conference is a place where people share knowledge and experience, and that is very special,” says Aylin Özalp:
“Dataharvest is an amazing platform for our winner announcement and to have our winners talk about their winning pieces. It is exactly the right audience for them to talk about their articles, being in a community that understands what their work really means.”