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 a writer, broadcaster and journalist, David Vaughan. His documentary novel Hear My Voice won the 2015 Czech Book readers’ prize. The English version was published in London in 2019. David Vaughan has made award-winning radio documentaries and for the BBC and Czech Radio on a wide variety of subjects. He lives in Prague and 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. He is author and curator of the exhibition No Night So Dark (2020, 2021), which tells the story of one family’s search for its own past. He also created a podcast telling the family’s story (2021).
First of the two women in the jury team is Emily Thompson. Contributor to public radio in the United States and the Communications Officer for the Prague Civil Society Centre. She previously worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where she hosted and produced a podcast called Heard It From Her, a conversation with a woman in media with a story to tell. She was also the Web Editor for the Media and Public Affairs Department, where she worked to promote press freedom in the broadcast region and showcase the work of RFE/RL journalists. Prior to joining RFE/RL in 2013, she worked as a writer and editor for The Prague Post and several other regional publications focused on Central Europe.
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Natalia Churikova, the third member of the jury, is an international journalist with Voice of America, Ukrainian Service. In early 2022 she was editor in chief of Radio Ukraine in Prague, Czech Republic. Before that for more than 25 years she was a journalist, editor and trainer with RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. Churikova joined RFE/RL in 1995 as an economic correspondent with an interest in foreign policy, especially European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
In 2005, she started a program “European Liberty,” which later became the interactive “Europe Connect” project, which explored topics relevant to Ukraine’s move towards Europe. As a peer trainer she provided mentoring and instruction to dozens of staff and free-lance journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the North Caucasus, Moldova, Tatarstan and Ukraine. Early in her career, she won a Sander Thoenes Fellowship at The Financial Times, earning the opportunity to report for the FT in London, Brussels and Frankfurt. Churikova has commented on Ukrainian issues for Czech media and at international conferences.
A grand total of twenty one jurors will be deciding the winners of the 38th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival awards. National and international radio professionals will sit on each of the juries for the documentary, drama, reportage, and podcast categories and decide which works will reach the main competition.
The fourth member of the jury, Jolyon Naegele, is a native of New York City. After studying international relations at City College of New York and the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna and Washington, he worked as a journalist inter alia as Voice of America’s correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe (1984-94). During that time he covered Communist repression and the disintegration of one-party rule throughout the region.
He interviewed a wide variety of opposition figures, as well as members of oppressed minority groups, and covered the break-up of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. He worked for RFE/RL (1996-2003), mainly covering the western Balkans as well as Slovakia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. He served as a political affairs officer for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Kosovo (2003-2017). He currently lives in the Czech Republic, where he is researching the files of the Communist-era secret police. In December 2019, he was awarded the Jiří Pelikán prize for his journalistic work in contributing to the restoration of democracy in Czechoslovakia.
The last member is Jeremy Bransten, serves as Acting Editor-in-Chief of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty since October 1, 2022. 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.
