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 working as the radio correspondent for the German national radio, Deutschlandradio and ARD, in Prague since September 2022. Marianne Allweiss is reporting about the Czech Republic and Slovakia for more than 60 German public radio stations as well as contributing to online and social media. She has been working for the German national radio station “Deutschlandfunk Kultur” in Berlin since her editorial traineeship in 2009/2010: she hosted and planned current programs in the "Prime Time", worked as an editor and presenter in the newsroom as well as a reporter.
Marianne Allweiss gained experiences in the Czech Republic working for the German program of “Radio Prague”, the Czech international radio station in 2008. She has represented the German correspondent in Prague several times in recent years. She studied history, political science and economics in Berlin and Potsdam (Germany), Tartu (Estonia) and at the College of Europe in Warsaw (Poland).
David Jakš began his career as a news editor at the regional office of Czech Television in Cheb, later working in Pilsen and Prague. He hosted the Czech Television current affairs programme Události v regionech, shot news reports for the programme Objektiv, and later joined the investigative team behind the programme Fakta. He worked for a year for the Czech section of the world’s largest media organisation, China Radio International, in Beijing.
After a break from journalism – during which he worked as a cleaner in American supermarkets, a tour guide for travel agencies in East and Southeast Asia, and as a freelance journalist – he returned to public service media, this time to Czech Radio. From February 2017 to December 2022, he served as Czech Radio’s permanent correspondent in Asia, first based in Beijing and later in Bangkok. His reporting took him to earthquake-stricken regions, COVID-19 quarantine zones in Asia, refugee camps in Bangladesh, congresses of the Chinese Communist Party, and several Olympic Games held in Asia.
He considers the best international news and current affairs as being offered by the Singaporean platform Channel News Asia, the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and the Japanese media organisation Nikkei Asia. Since 2023, when he returned from his post as a Czech Radio’s foreign correspondent, he has been serving as Director of the Regional Studios of Czech Radio Plzeň and Czech Radio Karlovy Vary.
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 two jurors will be deciding the winners of the 41st 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.
Rob Cameron is the BBC's correspondent in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, covering politics, society, business, arts and other subjects for BBC Radio, BBC TV and BBC News Online. Rob moved to Prague from his native London in 1993. He began his radio career in 1999, when he joined Radio Prague, the international service of Czech Radio. He began reporting for the BBC in 2001, becoming the full-time Czech and Slovak correspondent in 2004, although he also contributes to other broadcasters. As well as reporting from the length and breadth of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, he’s covered stories in Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. When war broke out in February 2022, he spent 10 days on the Slovak-Ukraine border, hearing the stories of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. During his career he has interviewed prime ministers and presidents, artists and spies, including such diverse personalities as Václav Havel, Ai Wei Wei, Madeleine Albright, Sir Nicholas Winton, Danny DeVito, and the Dalai Lama. His work is available at www.robjcameron.com
Last member of the jury, David Vaughan (www.davidvaughan.cz), 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 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 (2020-2024), which tells the story of a family’s search for its own past. He also created a podcast telling the family’s story (2021).
