Five experts will choose the best new report
Five judges will decide on the winners of the news report contributions in the Prix Bohemia Radio awards. Experts with experience from the local and international radio scene will sit in the professional panel.
One of the judges on the professional News Report panel will be David Vaughan, a writer, publicist and radio editor living in Prague. His documentary novel Hear My Voice won the 2015 Czech Book readers’ prize. The English version has just been published in London. David Vaughan has made award-winning radio documentaries for the BBC and Czech Radio on a wide variety of subjects. He teaches journalism and lectures on media history at several Prague universities. His book Battle for the Airwaves (2008) looks at the central role of radio in the Munich Crisis of 1938. For eight years he was editor-in-chief of Radio Prague, the international service of Czech Radio, and prior to that he was the BBC correspondent in Prague.
The second judge is Sound Director Andrzej Brzoska, whose career has been connected with Radio Poland ever since 1979. He received the title of Doctor of Musical Arts with a specialisation in sound direction and he is a member of the Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry.
Between 1994 and 2009 he was Deputy Head of the Polish Radio Theatre. On many occasions his recordings have represented Polish Radio at various international festivals: Prix Italia, Prix Europe, Prix Marulić and others. He won the Grand Prix at the Prix Marulić festival in Hvar in 2002 and has also been given awards at the Prix Italia Festival and at Dwa Teatry in Sopot. His radio play Andy was honoured with an award for the best European play of 2013 at the Prix Europa international festival in Berlin. He lectures at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. In 2011 he was awarded the AES Fellowship Award for continuous excellence in audio production and for his achievements in the area of audio technologies. In 2016 he founded the radio station Radio Voice of Children at the Educational Institute for Blind Children in Kibeho, Rwanda. His recording Christmas Time was awarded the prestigious Platinum CD for the year 2018.
The winners of the 36th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival will be decided by twenty jury members. A jury of five professional personalities from the local and international radio environment will decide which works will advance to the main competition in each of the documentary, drama, news report and multimedia categories.
The third on the panel of judges will be Emily Thompson, who contributes to public radio in the United States and bears the responsibility for communication in the non-profit organisation Prague Civil Society Centre. She previously worked for Radio Free Europe where she performed interviews with interesting women from the media under the title Heard It From Her. She was also involved in the support of independent journalism in the area of broadcasting and the promotion of the work of local reporters. Before she began working for Radio Free Europe in 2013, she worked as an author and editor for the newspaper The Prague Post and several other periodicals with a focus on Central Europe. Her native language is English and she also speaks fluent Czech and French.
The fourth member of the jury, Jolyon Naegele, was born in New York. After studying International Relations at the City College of New York and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, he worked as a reporter for Voice of America for Central and Eastern Europe. He focused on the growing opposition to Communist power throughout the region and the subsequent collapse of the single party government. He recorded a large number of interviews with opposition representatives and members of discriminated minorities. He also followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the consequences. In the years 1996-2003 he worked as an editor for RFE/RL, during which he was primarily involved in the Western Balkans as well as with developments in Slovakia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the years 2003-2017 he worked on a UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo as a political analyst. He currently lives in the Czech Republic and is researching the StB (secret police) archives. In December 2019, he received the Jiří Pelikán Award for longstanding work for the renewal of democracy in Czechoslovakia.
The last judge on the festival's panel is the former Czech Radio foreign correspondent, Petr Vavrouška. He has operated in areas of crisis such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Macedonia. As a reporter he attended two winter Olympic Games and reported from the Mount Everest base camp. As a foreign reporter he worked in Russia, Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Slovakia. He has received many awards for his work in Czech Radio. He received the Novinářská křepelka award as well as being a two time laureate of the Journalism Award. He also received the Prix Bohemia Radio International Award in 2008. He wrote two books, Ruská duše (Russian Soul) and Polská duše (Polish soul). Today, Vavrouška works as the Business Director of mmcité+.
