Award
Grimme Online Award: Joko & Klaas among favorites
Joko Winterscheidt (l) and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf have been nominated for the Grimme Online Award. photo
© Daniel Karmann/German Press Agency GmbH/dpa
The Grimme Online Award draws attention to good offers on the internet. What Joko and Klaas are nominated for and who or what else has good chances – all the details.
The TV entertainers Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf have the prospect of a Grimme Online Award – precisely because they have given up something. The two ProSieben celebrities gave away their Instagram accounts with a total of more than two million followers to two Iran activists.
Since then, they have been posting photos and videos of the uprising against the Iranian regime there. “A possible role model for other influencers to share their reach,” praised the jury in Cologne today when announcing the nominations for the Grimme Online Award. The undoped prize is considered the most important award for online journalism in Germany. It will be awarded on June 15th.
Thematic focus
This year, the jury selected 28 network offers from around 800 submissions. The focus was on the categories of information and knowledge and education.
It is striking that every fourth nominated offer is a podcast. As in the previous year, the podcast is proving to be the most prominent investigative format on the internet. The controversial platform Tiktok is also well represented.
In terms of subject matter, however, the rather small number of offers related to the Ukraine war was surprising: only three of the nominated submissions have anything to do with it.
A clear focus in 2023 is on historically relevant topics, especially on National Socialism. For example, West German Broadcasting (WDR) has developed an app and a website on “Stolpersteine” by artist Gunter Demnig. Each of these brass stones is placed in front of the last place of residence of a person who was abducted or murdered by the Nazis and bears their name. The WDR offer provides additional information about the life stories of the respective Nazi victims.
More nominations
Another commemorative project is the interactive exhibition “Fritz Bauer: In the fight for human rights”. The Hessian Attorney General Bauer (1903-1968) was the driving force behind the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s.
One of the few Ukraine formats is the research “The Business with Ukrainian Refugees” by “Business Insider”, which belongs to Axel Springer. It reveals that some refugees from the Ukraine are systematically placed in undeclared work in Germany. Kremlin lies are revealed in “Fake News – Russian Propaganda for Beginners” in the Arte media library.
An example of extensive in-depth research is the six-part podcast “The Flood – Why did Johanna have to die?” Based on the fate of a young woman who has just fallen in love, the SWR/WDR production unrolls the flood of the century in the Ahr Valley in 2021, makes the causes of the failure of the authorities understandable and does not spare public broadcasting either.
Another nominated podcast titled “Who the f*** is Alice?” comes from the magazine of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. The focus is on 80-year-old Alice Schwarzer, who is considered a pioneer of German feminism, but is viewed very critically by younger feminists in particular.
The multimedia story “Abortion in Germany” by Correktiv.lokal reveals how poor the supply situation for abortions is.