Deadline: May 31, 2021
Applications for the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund Awards 2021 are now open. The awards recognise excellence in courageous reporting of conflict, corruption, human rights transgressions and other related issues.
Since its inception in 2002, the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund has sought to support those journalists Kurt most admired, the freelancers and local reporters whose work is often poorly paid, mostly unsung and all too often fraught with danger.
Today, the three annual awards, for freelance and local journalism and, since 2017, for newsfixers, are recognized worldwide as a mark of excellence and have an established track record for brave reporting on conflict, corruption and injustice.
Award Categories
The 20th annual call for awards is therefore now split into three categories:
- A Local Reporter award that recognizes the often over-looked work of journalists in developing nations or countries in transition who write about events in their homeland.
- A Freelance award for those journalists who travel to the world’s conflict zones, usually at great personal risk, to witness and report the impact and consequences of events.
- A News Fixer award rewarding local journalists and/or experts, hired by a visiting foreign reporter or news organization, whose guidance and local knowledge materially benefited the content, impact and reach of the stories submitted.
Award
- Each award is for $5,000 and will be presented at a prestigious ceremony in London in late September 2021.
Eligibility
- Open to freelance journalists, local reporters and fixers from all over the world;
- Entrants must submit three articles each – published between June 1, 2020 and May 31, 2021.
Submission Criteria
- Three separate articles must be submitted, including when journalists are nominating fixers for the new award.
- Accepted media: any print-based medium, such as newspapers and magazines, or established online publications. Blogs, personal websites and social media pages or channels are not accepted.
- Articles can encompass war reporting, human rights issues, cross-border troubles, corruption or other controversial matters impacting on people’s lives. Judges will be looking for professionalism, high journalistic standards, and evidence of dedication and courage in obtaining the story.
- Because of problems with scanned entries and failed links in previous years, they require that each article be provided as a text file – MS Word (.doc or .docx) or similar text format (.rtf), or a PDF of a text file.
- You may supply a URL link to your article(s), or a scan (as a PDF or JPG file) as supporting evidence of the publication context, but your entry will be disqualified if you do not also submit the required text files.
- The awards panel will take into account nominations for fixers who have received more than one recommendation from journalists they have worked with.
Application
Additional material you must provide:
- a CV or resumé about your education and journalism career or about that of the fixer you are nominating.
- a passport-quality photo (JPEG, GIF or PNG file, size no larger than 250Kb) of yourself or that of the fixer you are nominating.
- a high standard English translation if the original articles are not in English.
- a short statement explaining what you had to do to get the story.
In the case of the fixer award, they require from the nominating journalist:
- A statement of nomination.
- A copy of the story or stories generated because of the nominated fixer’s involvement.
- A statement that the nominee is aware that he/ or she is being nominated and has given permission for the nomination (or perhaps the nomination for anonymous if win). The awards panel will take into account nominations for fixers who have received more than one recommendation from journalists they have worked with.
- An acceptance from the nominator and nominee that they accept the terms of the competition.
- Two references.
The maximum file size for text submissions or scans is 5Mb.
For more information, visit Kurt Schork Memorial Fund.
