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 represented the German correspondent in Prague several times in recent years. Marianne Allweiss gained experience in the Czech Republic working for the German program of Radio Prague International, the Czech Radio international radio station, in 2008. She studied history, political science and economics in Berlin and Potsdam (Germany), Tartu (Estonia) and at the College of Europe in Warsaw (Poland).
Acting Editor-in-Chief of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty since October 1, 2022. Jeremy Bransten started out as a journalist focused on Russia, and over the last 25 years, he has traveled through nearly every 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.
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.
A grand total of twenty one jurors will be deciding the winners of the 39th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival awards. National and international radio professionals will sit on each of the juries for the documentary, drama, news report, and podcast categories and decide which works will reach the main competition.
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.
Emily Thompson is a contributor to public radio in the United States and is the Communications Officer for the Prague Civil Society Centre, which supports civic groups and independent media in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She previously worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as 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.
Last member of the jury, David Vaughan, is a writer, broadcaster and journalist, living in Prague. 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 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).
