09/03/2016
Press for More Award – Call for submissions
About the Award
The iMinds Press for More Award celebrates journalistic initiatives in Europe that reflect an entrepreneurial and innovative way of bringing news closer to the citizens or that engage in new forms of journalistic practice. The Press for More Award wants to stimulate journalistic practices that strive to truly inform citizens. It aims to encourage more and better journalism, enabled through novel ways of doing investigative journalism, creating journalism networks, encourage citizen interactions, explore new business models etc.
The iMinds Press for More Award was established in 2015 by iMinds as part of Difference Day. The inaugural edition received 29 submissions from 15 different European countries. The 2015 laureate was Obviz, a content platform that applies innovative language processing algorithms to empower readers to better assess the pros & cons of various controversies.
Who should apply?
The Press for More Award explicitly wants to encourage and to promote such initiatives. This means in particular that the Award looks for novel initiatives with realized impact and great potential:
The impact can be demonstrated (i.e. it is beyond the proof of concept phase, it is actually being deployed or is currently used, albeit possibly on a smaller scale),
The potential of the initiative should be worthy of further encouragement.
The prize will go to novel journalistic practices or enablers of novel journalistic practices that …
have impact and/or roots in Europe,
currently have a significant impact, i.e. which can be felt today,
are growing and still have significant growth potential.
Practices or enablers could mean reporting, storytelling, investigations, interactions, platforms, projects, tools, services, products, business models, etc.
The laureate has to be a resident of an EU member state or has to be an institution or project that originates in the European Union.
Process & Timing
An international jury is set up which takes full account of a number of delicate equilibria. Publishers, journalists, broadcasting organizations, new online media, policy makers and research institutions working on novel journalism projects are all involved.
The partner organizations who will be part of the jury will soon be announced.
First, a longlist of candidates will be composed based on the admission criteria. From this longlist, a group of experts within iMinds will select ten candidates to be shortlisted. From this shortlist, after deliberation, the jury will select one final laureate of the iMinds Press for More Award to be awarded a 5.000€ encouragement prize to further develop the initiative or to explore new paths to improve journalism.
14 March: Submission deadline
8 April: Winner is informed
3 May: Award ceremony as part of Difference Day