Award winners underline continuing importance of journalism

In a world of alternative facts, failing business models and a collapse of popular trust in institutions, journalism can seem to be in a dismal state. But reading more than 600 entries from 39 countries as part of the committee that draws up the shortlist for the European Press Prize, a very different picture emerges.

Big, well-funded news organisations across Europe continue to produce serious, captivating stories, often told in innovative ways using new, digital formats. International co-operation on blockbuster projects such as the Panama Papers and Lux Leaks has created a powerful, new form of investigative journalism. But some of the most impressive and important reporting is produced by small groups of journalists with little money, under oppressive and often dangerous circumstances.

Established in 2012 and funded by a number of newspaper-owning foundations, including The Irish Times Trust, the prize is open to all print and digital journalists from any of the 47 countries in the Council of Europe. There are four prizes, each worth €10,000, for Commentary, Distinguished Writing, Innovation and Investigative Reporting.

Shortlist

A preparatory committee chaired by former Guardian editor Peter Preston sifts through the entries to produce a shortlist (none of us takes part in any discussion of entries from a news organisation we are associated with). A different panel, chaired by former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans and including former Le Monde editor Sylvie Kaufman, former Jyllands-Posten editor Jørgen Ejbøl, former El Pais editor Juan Luis Cebrián, and Yevgenia Albats, editor of the Moscow weekly the New Times, chooses the winners.

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A year ago, the entries were dominated by epic, harrowing accounts of the migration of millions of people from the Middle East across Europe. This year, the focus has turned to the fate of those migrants since then, in stories such as Der Spiegel's "Step-uncle Sam", by Dialika Neufeld, about the more than 3,000 unaccompanied children who arrived in Berlin in a single year.

Stern's "71 Lives", by Felix Hutt, is a painstaking reconstruction of the stories of the 71 refugees who were found dead in an abandoned lorry outside Vienna in August 2015. Forgotten by most of the media soon after the shocking discovery of their corpses, they emerge from the story no longer as victims or statistics but as people.

Failed coup

The Innovation award can honour anything from new forms of storytelling to new platforms or innovative business models for journalism. This year’s award goes to the Dutch online investigative group Bellingcat for a gripping account of last year’s failed coup in Turkey, told through the conspirators’ WhatsApp messages.

The shortlist for Investigative Reporting included the Panama Papers and "Dark Money", a Financial Times investigation into the role of the City of London in facilitating money laundering. But it also featured brilliant investigations into corruption in central and eastern Europe and the award went to the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CIJS) for a series of articles about corruption and organised crime.

The journalists at CIJS are young, they have no money and they struggle to find outlets for their journalism in Serbia’s mainstream media, which is controlled by powerful political and business interests. They face intimidation, physical threats, legal pressures and obstruction in their efforts to uncover the truth. But they persist, applying the strictest professional standards to produce some of the finest, most important journalism anywhere in Europe today.

Journalists in central and eastern Europe tend to eschew commentary in favour of reporting, but opinion writing is flourishing in western Europe. Fintan O'Toole came through as this year's winner in a field that included John Harris's brilliant commentaries on Britain's EU referendum from the Guardian, as well as strong entries from Germany and the Netherlands, and AA Gill's account in the Sunday Times of the cancer that killed him last year.