The radio experts: The best News Reports will be selected by five experts
Five jurors will decide on the Reportage winners in Prix Bohemia Radio. The jury can boast experts with many years of experience in creating radio programs and foreign reporting.
The first 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.
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.
A grand total of twenty jurors will be deciding the winners of the 37th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival awards. Five national and international radio professionals will sit on each of the juries for the documentary, drama, reportage, and multimedia categories and decide which works will reach the main competition.
Peter Lange, the third member of the jury, studied opinion journalism, political studies and modern history at the Free University of Berlin. Since 1983 he has worked as editor at the radio station Rias Berlin and Deutschlandradio Berlin. In 1995 he transferred to the Cologne station Deutschlandfunk as editor-in-chief. He then worked as newsreader for Zeitfunk, head of department at Aktuelles and editor-in-chief at Deutschlandradio Kultur in Berlin from 2007 to 2016. In 2016 he relocated to Prague, where he works as foreign correspondent for ARD and Deutschlandradio for the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
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 member is Jeremy Bransten, the regional director for the European office of Radio Free Europe, supervises local-language services from the Caucasus to Central Europe. He started out as a journalist focused on Russia, and over the last 25 years, he has traveled through nearly country of the former Soviet Bloc. He has also served as the director of Radio Free Europe’s central office. He studied Russian and Soviet history at Harvard and Central European history at London University. Prague is the long-term home base of both Jeremy and his family.
