Last week, we held our annual Journalism as a Profession Awards ceremony. It feels like only yesterday that we at Open Russia founded the award, but it has been nine years! As always, a huge number of talented journalists were nominated for their groundbreaking professional work in eight categories.

Over the past year, the profession has not become any safer. But there’s no getting away from it – someone has to tell the truth, and there must be someone for people to trust. The reality today is very different from 2016, when I founded the award – now, there are many more impactful and tragic stories.

I would also like society to remember that different points of view and different approaches are acceptable. Sometimes, those who assert such principles are given awards, and not five-year prison terms.

The prize recipients are listed below – please do read and watch their materials. And, of course, my heartfelt congratulations go to the winners!

The Country: Olga Mutovina, People of Baikal, for her work ‘Everybody understood how to live to survive’

Investigation: Irina Kravtsova, Novaya Gazeta Baltia, for her article ‘I read in the gazes of my neighbours that I had betrayed them all. The whole nation – Hundreds of Ukrainian women have been subjected to sexual violence during the war, but their nightmare did not end there’

Story/Reporting: Lesya Lapina, Holod, for her material ‘What he saw, where he was. The life and death of Nikita Tsitsagі’

Multimedia: Perito, for its editorial ‘Subordination of Territory: How the Soviet Union and its successor Russia Handle Resources, People and Nature’

Documentary Film: Victoria Arakelyan, Tatyana Preobrazhenskaya, Diana Kuryshko and Andrey Goryanov, BBC Russian Service, for their work ‘Death lives in my house: The story of a battle in Vuhledar’

Interview/Portrait: Katerina Gordeeva, Say Gordeeva, for her interview with Valery Yashin and Irina Yashina, ‘When the regime ends, his sentence ends’

Analysis: Ilya Roshal and Sasha Kappinen, Public Sociology Lab (part of the research published on ReRussia), for their work ‘Parallel Cheremushkin: Absence and Presence of War in a Provincial Russian City’

Digital Channels: Armen Zakharyan for ‘Armen and Fedor’

The Special Jury Prize for 2024 is awarded to our colleagues who are being persecuted in Russia: Antonina Favorskaya, Artyom Krieger (SotaWision), Sergey Karelin and Konstantin Gabov (Associated Press and Reuters), arrested in 2024; Maria Ponomarenko (RusNews), imprisoned since 2022; and all of those reporters whose names we do not mention, but who continue to work in Russia without fear or reproach, and remain faithful to the profession of journalism.

Nominations for the 2025 awards will be accepted until 1 November.