Judges: 2022
Jane Debois, Head of Standards & Regulation at Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) (News)
Jane leads the standards team at Ipso – the Independent Press Standards Organisation. They protect and promote high-quality journalism in over 2,000 of the UK’s press titles and associated digital content. Jane’s team works closely with leading news outlets – including the Sun, Mirror, The Times, Tatler, Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, the Irish News, and local papers from the Cornish Guardian to the John O’Groats Courier. Her job is to drive up editorial standards, protect the public and defend freedom of expression. She understands the power of journalism to uncover injustice and effect change in the world.
Laura Bates, feminist campaigner, author, and founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project (Blog and Self-Published)
This project is an ever-increasing collection of more than 100,000 testimonies of gender inequality, which has been described as “one of the biggest social media success stories on the internet”. The project has expanded into 20 countries worldwide and become internationally renowned, featuring in media from the New York Times to the Times of India. Laura has an online following of a quarter of a million Twitter and Facebook followers.
Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, Independent and TIME among others. She was the recipient of the Georgina Henry Women in Journalism award for Innovation at the 2015 British Press Awards.
Laura works closely with politicians, schools and universities worldwide, as well as bodies from the United Nations to the Council of Europe to combat gender inequality. She is also Contributor to Women Under Siege, a New York-based organisation working against the use of rape as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide, and she is Patron of Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support, part of the Rape Crisis network.
Samira Ahmed is an award-winning journalist with 20 years' experience in print and broadcast, and is a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Kingston University (Opinion and Comment)
She began her career as a BBC News Trainee in 1990 and has worked as a News Correspondent and a reporter on the Today programme and Newsnight, where she was one of the first broadcast journalists to investigate the rise of Islamic radicalism on British university campuses in the early 1990s. She covered the OJ Simpson case as BBC Los Angeles Correspondent and was a presenter and reporter at Channel 4 News from 2000 to 2011.
Samira won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year Award in 2009 for her film on so-called "corrective" rape in South Africa, and made the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary series Islam Unveiled. Samira has also worked as a news anchor for BBC World and for Deutsche Welle TV in Berlin, and writes regularly for newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Independent and The Big Issue. She has presented many news and arts programmes for BBC TV and radio, including The World Tonight, PM, Sunday Morning Live on BBC One, Night Waves on Radio 3 and The Proms on BBC Four.
Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana,Head of Regulation at IMPRESS (Features)
Lexieis a New Zealand qualified barrister and solicitor who has worked in all forms of media regulation. She has worked at the Advertising Standards Authority in the investigations team and at the New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification, an independent state media regulator, in a semi-judicial capacity, and where she was also the research lead on the ‘young New Zealanders viewing sexual violence’ project. She is currently Head of Regulation at IMPRESS: the Royal Charter approved self-regulatory body for the press in the UK, where she manages all aspects of the regulatory services IMPRESS provides to its publisher members and the public. The IMPRESS Standards Code addresses all aspects of news-gathering and publishing, including accuracy, non-discrimination and reporting on justice.
