awards
Grimme Online Award for historical research and more
Stumbling blocks in Cologne. The app and website “Stolpersteine in NRW” is one of the winners of this year’s Grimme Online Awards. photo
© Federico Gambarini/dpa
The Grimme Online Award is considered the most important award for online journalism. This time, established media houses were just as important as small providers. There was even a Tiktok channel.
Two extensive research projects on the Nazi and GDR past received the Grimme Online Award in Cologne. On the one hand, an app and website developed by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) that refers to the 16,000 stumbling blocks in North Rhine-Westphalia was honored. With the brass stones embedded in the floor, the artist Gunter Demnig has been commemorating people who were persecuted under National Socialism for many years. In its offer, WDR tells the life stories of many of these victims.
A “scrollytelling” on the closed Jugendwerkhof Torgau in the GDR, which was developed by the memorial of the same name, also received an award. The Jugendwerkhof was a particularly brutal home in which “conspicuous” children and young people were to be brought into line by the unjust communist state. “The good editing impressively conveys the insidiousness and maliciousness of the home system without dramatizing,” praised the jury.
A multimedia documentation about queer life from 1900 to 1950 was awarded as the third offer of historical memory on the Internet. Here, too, the provider is a museum institution, the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. The online exhibition opens up an amazing variety of queer life in the time of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. In the 1920s there were around 80 lesbian bars and hangouts in Berlin alone. The flourishing subcultures were then destroyed by the Nazis.
Several in-depth researches awarded
In addition to the topic “remembering”, in-depth research dominated the field of winners. This included the multimedia story “Abortion in Germany” created by Correctiv.Lokal. It reveals how poor the information and care situation is for women who want to have an abortion in Germany.
The jury recognized the podcast series “Expensive living” from Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) as another outstanding research achievement. Using an example from Berlin-Charlottenburg, she shows how an intact house with affordable rental apartments is demolished and a complex with expensive condominiums is built on the site. The tenants have to move out.
A production by the Swiss “Tages-Anzeiger” (Zurich) also received an award, the online documentary “The End of Eternal Ice” about the melting of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. In the opinion of the jury, the authors have managed to tell a highly complex scientific phenomenon in an accessible story that non-scientists can also understand: “In doing so, they bring an explosive and very topical topic from the nerd corner to the general public.”
Also social media offers among the award winners
The jury also honored two social media offerings: One award went to Stève Hiobi’s “Dein Bruder Stève” Tiktok channel, which is a one-man operation without editing and technical support, which distributes news from and about Africa. “Although the TikTok platform should be viewed critically, Stève Hiobi’s videos hit a young target group there, which is otherwise very difficult to reach with news content,” said the jury.
The second award-winning offer in this area was the WDR-operated Instagram channel “Hand it” with information and entertainment for the deaf. The so-called majority society is included through subtitles. The verdict of the jury: “This is inclusion: enabling others to participate in one’s own reality of life and one’s own view of the world in order to ultimately reduce the demarcation.”
The audience award once again went to a YouTube channel, this time to the science journalism program “Doctor Whatson”. It covers topics related to physics, environment, philosophy, sustainability and technology.
The Grimme Online Awards are considered the most important prizes for online journalism. The director of the Grimme Institute, Frauke Gerlach, summarized: “For our cultural, political and social coexistence, high-quality offers that counterbalance polarization and populism are more important than ever.”