Deadline: 1-Feb-21
Nominations are now open for the 2021 Sigma Awards to empower, elevate and enlighten the global community of data journalists. The Sigma Awards is a competition to celebrate the best data journalism from around the world.
The international data journalism community is facing many challenges, and they want to support them. This year’s Sigma Awards will be about highlighting the very best data journalism done about the pandemic (and building an international database record of such projects), but also those covering other topics such as politics, sports, or the environment.
Goals
This year, Sigma Awards did like to focus the efforts on four main goals:
- To highlight the very best data journalism being done around the world, putting a real focus on those tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. A multitude of compelling projects tackling COVID-19 have been released over the past few months, in all regions of the world. They want to celebrate that great work, share it with the community and get journalists to get inspired and learn from each other’s projects;
- To build a community that endures beyond the awards themselves;
- To set up webinars, chats and gather online resources tackling the real urgent issues met by journalists today.
- To use the awards as a way to unite, galvanise and expand data journalism communities around the world. Core to this project is The Sigma Awards team’s ambition to ignite collaborations and discussions between members of the community.
Award Information
- A 5000 USD cash prize will also be split amongst the winners, who will also get a certificate suitable for framing.
Eligibility Criteria
- Entries must be for work published in calendar year 2020.
- Applicants can enter as many projects as they want to the competition.
- Entries should specify if they qualify as a large or a small newsroom or as an individual, where applicable. Small newsrooms are defined as those with 35 or fewer journalists (including regular freelancers/contractors), or equivalent (eg, two half-time freelancers count as one person.)
- Organisations that do not qualify under this definition but who believe they belong in the small newsroom category may petition for an exception by sending a letter from the editor-in-chief explaining his or her rationale to Marianne Bouchart, executive director
- Collaborative work should be entered as a large newsroom.
- Entering organisations grant The Sigma Awards the right to use their material in their entry, including the organisation’s name and logo, on The Sigma Awards website and other marketing material around the awards.
- 2020 has been a special year for all members of the data journalism community, and they expect to receive a large number of entries tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they did like to specify that all data journalism projects, regardless of their topics, can be entered in the competition.
- This year, they will accept entries from all over the world! Entries in other languages than English are accepted, but you will have to translate as much as possible so that their pre-jury and jury can fully understand your work.
For more information, visit https://sigmaawards.org/