The Sigma Awards is a competition to celebrate the best data journalism from around the world.
Striding into its fourth year, it’s also here to empower, elevate and enlighten the global community of data journalists.
The international data journalism community is facing many challenges, and we want to support them. This year’s Sigma Awards will be about highlighting the very best data journalism done about the pandemic (and building an international database record of such projects), the Russia-Ukraine war, but also those covering other topics such as politics, sports, or the environment.
We want to bring together a community, and support those working with data, whether it’s on climate change or international conflicts – because that’s one of the priorities for our community at the moment – or on any other subject.
The 2023 edition of The Sigma Awards received 638 entries from 332 organizations in 80 countries/areas.
This year, we’d like to focus our efforts on four main goals:
- To highlight the very best data journalism being done around the world. A multitude of compelling projects have been released over the past few months, in all regions of the world. We want to celebrate that great work, share it with our community, and get journalists to get inspired and learn from each other’s successes;
- To build a community that endures beyond the awards themselves;
- To set up online conferences, chats and gather online resources tackling the real urgent issues met by journalists today such as where to find data about crisis in their city/country/region, what’s to know when working with this type of data, what tools to use, how do others deal with the day-to-day challenges of working such data, etc.
- To use the awards as a way to unite, galvanize and expand data journalism communities around the world. Core to this project is The Sigma Awards team’s ambition to ignite collaborations and discussions between members of our community, on topics related to COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, and others.
To that end, winners will be brought together to participate in and lead online data journalism panels, discussions and workshops. More importantly, winners will be invited to #IJF24 in Italy to lead panel discussions and take part in sessions.
They will not only learn from each other, but will be reaching out to the broader community of data journalists and would-be data journalists, building relationships that will help spark better collaborations and work around the world.
A US$ 5,000 cash prize will also be split amongst the winners, who will each get a certificate suitable for framing.
Fresh content, delivered
Stay up to date with new content sent straight to your inbox! If you subscribe today to our newsletter, you'll get updates about the competition and data journalism initiatives from the Sigmas and its community all around the world. No more worrying about whether you missed something because of a pesky algorithm or news feed.
The Sigma Awards competition was created in 2019 by Aron Pilhofer (Temple University) and Gina Chua (formerly Reginald Chua, Reuters), with support from Simon Rogers (Google), Marianne Bouchart (HEI-DA), and Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (HEI-DA). It is supported by the Google News Initiative.
