Honoring Czech and Slovak Journalism

Throughout Europe, we have been working hard to aid the often wrenching transition from offline to online journalism. We have forged partnerships with newspapers and newspaper associations and sponsored a series of digital journalism contests. Our latest effort comes in the Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where we worked with the Open Society Fund to support a series of journalism awards.

The Czech and Slovak Journalism awards are eight years old, so we wanted to bring something new to the event. Our answer was to create organize "public online voting” for a special Czecho-Slovak award. Our sponsorship also supported two entirely new online categories, the Google Digital Innovation for professional journalism and the Google Digital Innovation for citizen journalism.



A total of 685 entries from 409 authors too part, almost a hundred more than the previous year. Online blogs comprised the single largest share of all entries. The winners of the Google prizes are:

Google Digital Innovation: Citizen Journalism

Czech Winner: Mikuláš Kroupa, Michal Šmíd, Lenka Kopřivová: "A memory of the nation"

Slovak Winner: Editorial team SME a SME.sk - "Online updates from the day of voting about ESM and government trust"

Google Digital Innovation: Professional Journalism

Czech Winner: Petr Holub, Sabina Slonková (Aktuálně.cz): "Corruption in health system vs 'Thanks, we are leaving' campaign"

Slovak Winner: Martin Filko "Series of blogposts about Slovak health system"

Czecho-Slovak Winner of public voting (the biggest impact on society):
Czech journalist Sabina Slonková (Aktuálně.cz): “Special investigation: Top secret salaries”

Congratulations for helping bring high-quality digital journalism to Slovak and Czech readers.

Posted by Janka Zichova, Communications Manager, Czech Republic and Slovakia