Beata Balogová

Beata Balogová was selected for the 2019 European Press Prize shortlist with ‘Let’s continue talking about murder, not Fico’s media tyranny‘

Beata Balogová is the editor-in-chief of SME, a major daily and news site in Slovakia. Prior to joining SME, between 2003 and 2014, Beata served as editor-in-chief of Slovakia’s English-language weekly The Slovak Spectator.

Beata became a journalist at the age of eighteen and since then she has been loyal to the profession and mission. She graduated from the School of Journalism of Columbia University in New York. Beata was also a Fulbright scholar appointed to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri Columbia in 1994. Beata writes columns and commentaries on politics, societal changes, populism and human rights.

Beata also serves as vice chair of the executive board of the International Press Institute (IPI) advocating media freedom in the Central European region. Beata is one of the co-organizers of the Best Media Traditions program, which brings Pulitzer Prize winning journalists to Slovakia.

Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole was selected for the 2019 European Press Prize shortlist with ‘Trial Runs for Fascism Are In Full Flow‘

Fintan O’Toole has been a columnist with the Irish Times in his native city, Dublin, since 1988. His work has received many awards, including the European Press Prize for Commentary in 2017 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism the same year. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and the Observer and teaches every Spring in Princeton where he is Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters. He has published over a dozen books on politics, history and culture, most recently Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.