Journalism awards are not suspected of being pretty humble events. This of course applies to all events at which an industry celebrates itself, be it the Oscars or the future price of the real estate industry. The special feature of the German Reporter Prize is that it is a prize that has to prove itself. Evidence since the reporter forum, which officially calls itself “Reporter :innenforum” since this year, had awarded its prize to Claas Relotius four times and thus became the big cheer for the reporter who forged many of his stories.
It has now been three years since Relotius was honored for the last time in the supreme discipline “Best Reportage” and was discovered only a few weeks later. The quake that caused the scandal mirrors triggered not only among journalists, but also among the public, also forced the reporter award to change. Since then, the nominated reports have been randomly checked by our own documentaries, and the winning reports have been checked in full.
On Monday evening, the prize was awarded for the second time under pandemic conditions. Moderator Andrea Thilo led through the twelve price categories from an apartment in an old building. The laudators presented the award to the excellent reporters in pre-recorded videos.
Thorsten Schmitz wins with a sports report about the Paralympic swimmer Gina Böttcher
Nicola Meier won the award for the best report for “The downfall“, the story of a boat accident off the Greek Mediterranean coast in SZ magazine. Together with the Time the SZ was also honored in the Investigation category, for the Pegasus project, an international research on surveillance software. For “Into the cold water”, a sports report about the Paralympic swimmer Gina Böttcher in the SZ, was awarded to Thorsten Schmitz. The podcast “Cui Bono: WTF happend to Ken Jebsen?” Daily mirror and the Saxon newspaper. A special award went to Marina Zolotova, the imprisoned editor-in-chief of the Belarusian portal Tut.by.
“This award has long been an incentive,” said Ariel Hauptmeier from the board of the “Reporter: Innenforum” at the award ceremony, “to dig deeper, to think more thoroughly, to penetrate the topics of the year, to discover new stories and to present them in an unusual way tell.”
And because prizes are of course never given out of sheer generosity, but also have to present the prize as an institution, what moderator Andrea Thilo said in the award video applies: You have “given everything so that the Reporter Prize is one thing above all else this year : relevant “.