Why we don’t ‘spend’ 10,000 on prizes, but enjoy awarding it!

By Thomas van Neerbos, Director of the European Press Prize

European Press Prize Award Ceremony 2017, Amsterdam

A journalist at our very first Cartoon Award Ceremony this year in Maastricht, approached me to ask me about our prize money, both for the European Cartoon Award as for the other European Press Prize award categories: “10,000 euros is quite a large amount of money, especially in the world of journalists – why so generous?”

I have been thinking about her question some more, and I feel like sharing what I told her then – and what I would have liked to add to that answer.

The short answer is: it’s not only about the money, but also about the money

Obviously, when the European Press Prize was founded, with big aspirations, in 2012, we wanted to up the Pulitzer Prizes. And since 10,000 euros is more than 10,000 dollars, this was a great first step. They have increased their prize money to 15,000 dollars since then.

So without being the highest bidder, what is the use of offering winners a large sum of money? Well, that sum of money does a number of things.

First, you need proper prize money when you are not a household name yet – when you cannot offer winners real publicity or credibility. In recent years, I am glad to add, we have been able to offer our winners and nominees credibility and visibility – monetisable as well.

Second, awarding generously is about attracting and receiving the best possible entries. One of our main tasks is to showcase the best journalism Europe has to offer. In order to do that, those best journalists need an incentive to enter their work – a possible prize of 10,000 euros is an important part of getting them to do so. Another important part is making it as easy as possible for them to enter, and free of charge.

But our prizes are much more than bait. It is not just about spending the money to get credibility and entries, it is about awarding it in order to create something new, something worthy. It is often the first step to another goal we have as an organisation: to enable creating even more quality journalism.

Former prize winners have – in their words – donated it to charities, used it to repair their roof, or to buy lots of beer. All noble causes…

Take Madeleine Schwartz, winner of the 2019 Opinion Award. She wanted “to create international dialogue about the issues that affect people all over the world and amplify the voices of writers in those countries” and used her prize money as seed funding for The Ballot – a website that offers insights in elections worldwide, in order for people to look beyond the elections – or lack thereof – in their own country. Something I, a big believer in thinking and acting beyond borders, wholeheartedly support.

10,000 euros offer a journalist time and resources to start an investigation, or an international collaboration. 10,000 euros can also provide independence: the possibility to start a project beyond what your editor, newsroom or audience demands.

The best part of my job is seeing these snowballs of opportunity slowly creating an avalanche of collaboration and quality journalism

European Press Prize Award Ceremony 2019, Warsaw

Our prize money is not just an amount of money befitting a cardboard check in a television show, it can be the start of something that inspires change for the better.

So that ‘quite a large amount of money’ can go a long way.

For all past and future winners: what did or would you spend your prize money on? No wrong answers, just curious to hear what the prize money made possible!

Ps. Enter your work before December 11 2020 for a chance at getting your work translated and therefore widely amplified, to join a community committed to excellence, and of course, for your chance at winning one of our 10,000 euro prizes.

Reporting From Small Communities: Energy Battles in Shetland

Do reporters always know what’s best for the environment and should their bias influence coverage? Even the roll-out of clean energy has its opponents. Here’s one case study on how local reporters met the contested evolution of wind energy in oil-rich Shetland.

By Claire Davenport

To onlookers, it could seem counterfactual that an economy heavily reliant on oil should oppose the erection of new wind farms on its shores. But that is what happened in Shetland.

Since 2009 Viking Energy, a partnership between a utility and a charitable trust, has been trying to erect large new onshore wind turbines that would eventually hook up to a subsea cable to the mainland, feeding the national grid.

“Shetland almost has a love affair with oil and suddenly renewable energy is on the scene but is met with a lot of opposition and skepticism,” said Hans Marter, managing editor of local news provider www.shetnews.co.uk who has been reporting local news in Shetland since 1996.

Shetland is home to one of Europe’s largest oil terminals, Sullom Voe, which is widely credited with transforming the island and funding social and infrastructural development. As a result Shetland now also has well over half a billion pounds of reserves in various funds.

While the environmental case against oil today is clear-cut, decades ago these arguments were not a generally-accepted science.

According to calculations made by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2011, oil is up to forty times more carbon-intensive than wind. There is also a sound business case to be made for wind; large onshore wind is cheaper and the taller the towers, the more hours of electricity that can be produced. But should journalists choose a side in the energy debate when their job is to uphold the primacy of balance or represent their public no matter the cost?

“The assumption that good journalism requires mutually opposed views to be treated as equally valid simply doesn’t hold when the overwhelming weight of evidence points resolutely in one direction.”

Physicist and cancer researcher David Robert Grimes argues that journalists should exercise more judgement when the scientific evidence is stacked against a specific point of view. He cites the prominent argument over whether to cite climate change deniers when 99% of the scientific community backs anthropogenic climate change. In another example, reputable news outlets have famously removed the word ‘dirty’ in front of ‘oil’, after caving to pressure from interfering oil flaks.

“The assumption that good journalism requires mutually opposed views to be treated as equally valid simply doesn’t hold when the overwhelming weight of evidence points resolutely in one direction,” Grimes wrote in a Guardian editorial in 2016.

But as energy stories play out in real time and affect tangible communities, news reporting does not necessarily assist in making clear distinctions, as reporters in Shetland learned.

For example, what do you do when your lobby are well-intentioned residents who will be directly disrupted by the overwhelming sight and sound of 150 enormous new turbines on their doorsteps, endangering their way of life and wildlife?

While Welsh-born reporter Charley-Kai John from the weekly print newspaper, The Shetland Times, agreed that reporters should not report all things equally, he added that local community reporting is by its nature more layered than the meta-analysis that plays out in national media.

“I think the most important thing for me as a journalist, aside from raising community concerns, was to represent those nuances in the story,” he said.

In Shetland, those nuances were tense emotional conflicts about land use, wildlife and to a larger extent an indigenous people defending its land from external interests.

In 2009 when planning applications were being made by Viking, residential groups, made up of crofters and other concerned parties, signed petitions to halt what they deemed a devastation to the surrounding landscape. At the time cohorts of that opposition were cited saying they were not convinced a large 600MW wind farm built on deep peat in an island community disconnected from the national grid would help combat climate change.

“I think the most important thing for me as a journalist, aside from raising community concerns, was to represent those nuances in the story.”

This gave rise to a grass-roots group confusingly called Sustainable Shetland. The group’s website says it has 826 members who oppose the wind farm on grounds that “the granting of consent in the face of strong environmental arguments sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of Scotland.”

Viking had proposed to build Europe’s largest onshore wind energy farm in peatland areas that residents argued were badly needed as carbon sinks and were also home to precious bird life. In 2015 a case to halt planning on the grounds that it endangered the habitat of whimbrel, a rare wading bird, was overturned by the UK’s High Court.

Local journalists have attempted to honour both sides of the Viking debacle but say balance has not been easy to come by.

The developers for Viking and their flaks did not help their case at first by providing dubitable figures for their projected carbon neutrality and their overall economic impact on Shetland. Pressed for clarity, they only seemed to flounder. And when community concerns grew louder, Viking grew silent.

“Viking did not return your calls or put anyone up for comment. We would get short, bland statements emailed to us but got no opportunity to put questions directly to the company,” said Mike Grundon who worked for BBC Shetland for over 22 years.

Grundon said it was his job as a local BBC reporter to cover local concerns than pursue any self-interest and added that he preferred to keep an open mind on the development of Shetland’s energy landscape.

Marter, however, who openly supports sustainable energy like wind, also struggled to get comment from Viking. He said he found it easy to get information or comment from local opponents to Viking, while the company itself fell deathly silent.

“The company claimed to develop a community-owned wind farm project, but when the community asked reasonable questions about it, they were ignored,” he said.

One doesn’t have to look far for media willing to criticise oil, but that coverage is scant in smaller news media for several reasons. When the oil boom arrived in Shetland in the late seventies, there was little if no opposition to its environmental impact nor was it yet fully understood.

“Oil has always been far more difficult to confront,” Marter added. “Not to mention their people are not local while initially Viking was a local project, and those behind the project were all well known locally.”

He believes that oil is still perceived as ‘a force for good’ in Shetland, helped by the fact the terminal has never been involved in any major environmental disaster since a slip in its early days in 1978 when the tanker Esso Bernicia spilled 1,100 tonnes of bunker oil in Sullom Voe harbour.

And while there are accessible local interests lobbying against the Viking wind farm, the same cannot be said for oil in the North Sea. Even large outfits will struggle to get their point across to Shetland.

Greenpeace has abandoned planned protests against the decommissioning of oil rigs, which leaves tonnes of oil sludge in the middle of the sea, after Shell won a court order preventing the activists from boarding oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.

Oil is also at the heart of vast social and economic change in Shetland from the presence of leisure centres in its outer corners to the funding of vital infrastructure and Arts organisations. The same cannot yet be said for wind. In spite of local opposition and the failure to win a government subsidy thus far, Viking still claims it is ‘shovel-ready.’

This battle of wills will likely continue to play out in the local news media for several more years, and perhaps wind projects will inadvertently receive some grace as oil buckles under the Covid-19 lockdown.