The Sigma Awards is a new international competition marking the most outstanding examples of data journalism. It will help fill the void left behind by the Data Journalism Awards, which since 2012 had been run by the now-defunct Global Editors Network.
“A bunch of us were very sad the Data Journalism Awards died, so we decided to do something about it — and try to do something a bit different,” Aron Pilhofer, the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University and one of the co-creators of the Sigma Awards, tweeted on January 2.
The first round of the Sigma Awards will have six categories and award nine winners with an all-expenses-paid trip to the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.
The international data journalism awards are BACK as the @sigmaawards with simpler categories. Applications open for the next month at https://t.co/AB1lQb7s30 . Its winners convene at the @journalismfest in Perugia! ✈️ Thanks to @reginaldchua and @pilhofer for continuing it.
— Sarah Cohen (@sarahcnyt) January 2, 2020
The DJAs were the first international ceremony to celebrate and support data-driven storytelling. In December, we wrote about the options that Pilhofer and Reginald Chua of Reuters, who were both jury members for the DJAs, were exploring to revive the awards. In 2020, the Google News Initiative will sponsor the Sigma Awards and the European Journalism Centre will host it on Datajournalism.com.
Last November, GEN announced it would fold after nine years due to a lack of sustainable funding. It had established the DJAs in 2012 and received over 600 award submissions from more than 80 countries in 2019.
Read more about the Sigma Awards here; applications for the first round of awards are due February 3.
