The Walkley Foundation has reinstated the international journalism category and added awards for specialist and explanatory journalism in a major overhaul of the annual awards for excellence in Australian journalism.
There will no longer be awards for public service journalism and best “headline, caption and hook”, while the innovation and production categories have been amalgamated. The number of categories remains the same at 28.
Due to the rise of podcasting, the board has renamed and refined the audio and radio categories. There will now be two categories: audio short (under 20 minutes) and audio long (over 20 minutes).
The backflip on the international journalism category comes six years after hundreds of the nation’s top journalists, editors, academics and media executives called on the Walkley awards advisory board to reverse its “short-sighted” decision to drop the category.
A petition signed by 480 media professionals and delivered to the then Walkley advisory board chair Angelos Frangopoulos and the Walkley’s chief executive, Jacqui Park, was ignored.
The chair of the Walkleys judging board, Michael Brissenden, said the decision to reinstate the international award was almost unanimous among the hundreds of journalists and media organisations consulted during the review.
“Almost every editor and every working journalist from big organisations to freelancers wanted to know if we were going to reinstate the international award,” Brissenden said.
“When it was removed at the last review there was a huge outcry and the outcry remains. Reporting international news on the ground through Australian eyes is often expensive and dangerous work.”
Brissenden said the judging board decided the criteria for the public service journalism was too broad and that entrants would be covered by other categories: “Isn’t everything we do public service journalism?”
A new “specialist and beat” reporting category provides journalists covering a specific subject or round – such as science, health, environment, technology, transport, arts, education or crime – to enter their work. Another new category for explanatory journalism, which Brissenden called a “consistent area of focus over the past few years,” will “recognise reporting of complex subjects using any available journalistic medium”.
The Walkley Foundation’s chief executive, Shona Martyn, said the foundation reviews award categories every five years to ensure the awards capture changes in the ever-evolving media landscape.
The review was led by the external consultant and founding editor of BuzzFeed Australia, Simon Crerar, and Brissenden.
The criteria for the Walkley book award have also been tightened to focus on books of journalism, rather than books by journalists.
The Walkleys, which were first presented in 1956, will open on 1 July 2023, with the winners to be announced in Sydney on 23 November 2023.
Separately, the Walkley Foundation is undertaking a review of the organisation’s complaints mechanism after withdrawing an award given to Nine News reporters Peter Fegan and Rebeka Powell for an investigation into the former federal politician Andrew Laming after an internal review.
The investigation of Laming won the Walkley award for television/video news reporting in 2021, but the foundation decided to review it after Nine News withdrew the allegations and apologised to the former Liberal National MP.
“The Walkley Foundation has appointed an external panel to review its complaints handling procedure,” Martyn said. “More information about this process will be announced shortly.”
