Nominations are open for the IJ4EU fund’s annual award celebrating excellence in European cross-border investigative journalism. Three cash prizes of €5,000 are available for investigative teams that have pushed the boundaries in tackling transnational stories of public interest.
Nominations opened on 7 March 2024 for the fourth IJ4EU Impact Award, run by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), one of four non-governmental organisations implementing the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) programme.
The deadline for nominations is 2 May 2024 at 23:59 CET.
Winners
Winners will be announced at a ceremony organised by ECPMF at IJ4EU’s annual UNCOVERED Conference in September 2024.
The IJ4EU Impact Award honours doggedness, courage and innovation in cross-border journalism in Europe.
Last year’s winners were The Devils Is in the Data, the Xinjiang Police Files, and Unmasking Europe’s Shadow Armies. The jury singled out a fourth investigation — Peat Pressure — for special commendation.
Eligibility
Any team meeting the eligibility criteria set out below can apply for the award, whether or not they have received IJ4EU funding. Anyone is welcome to nominate investigative projects, including their own journalistic work.
Investigations must have been published between 1 October 2022 and 31 December 2023.
The eligibility criteria are as follows:
- The award is open to cross-border investigations published via any credible medium (e.g. print, broadcast television or radio, online, documentary film, multimedia etc.).
- Nominated investigations must have been published between 1 October 2022 and 31 December 2023.
- Nominated investigations must involve journalists based in at least two European countries that have signed up to the full cross-sectoral strand of the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme, which provides core funding for IJ4EU. Eligible countries include all 27 EU member states and the following non-EU countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia and Ukraine.
- Nominated investigations need to highlight issues of common interest for European countries and be seen as having strengthened European media.
- Nominated investigations may have been published in any language. However, for investigations not published in English, a translation in English of the core investigation/summary must be provided.
- Nominations must include any significant challenge to an entry’s honesty, accuracy, or fairness, such as published letters, corrections, retractions, and responses by the relevant newspaper or website.
Partners
The Impact Award is supported by the IJ4EU’s other implementing partners, the International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and Arena for Journalism in Europe.
A team of independent researchers will begin evaluating the impact of the nominated projects in the spring. They will then be ranked according to:
- Impact of the nominated investigation
- Journalistic quality of the nominated investigation
- Innovative use of cross-border journalism to cover a topic of public interest
- Newsworthiness/added value of the nominated investigation to public discourse in the EU
- Storytelling techniques
During the summer of 2024, an independent jury set up by ECPMF will review the nominations (including a shortlist of the top 10) and select three cross-border investigations as winners. You can view last year’s jury here. Each award will be worth €5,000.
For more information, see the Awards page on the IJ4EU site and the relevant section in our frequently asked questions.