The Morley Safer Award for Outstanding Reporting included a $5,000 prize, recognition among industry peers at an award presentation event, and an invitation to speak to students at The University of Texas at Austin. The Award was bestowed on a reporter or team whose work the jury deemed as the best example of creativity, vision, and integrity in reporting from among the field of entries.recognition among industry peers at an award presentation event, and an invitation to speak to students at The University of Texas at Austin. The Award was bestowed on a reporter or team whose work the jury deemed as the best example of creativity, vision, and integrity in reporting from among the field of entries.
The Morley Safer Award for Outstanding Reporting was suspended indefinitely in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Please contact us at MorleySaferAward@austin.utexas.edu with questions.
Criteria
The Morley Safer Award celebrated work of creativity, vision, and integrity that, like Morley Safer’s, changed how we understand the world. Jurors looked for news stories that met the following criteria:
- An overlooked story of national significance or a fresh perspective on a familiar subject
- In-depth investigation that gets to the heart of important issues
- Approachable storytelling about complex political, cultural, or social issues
- Meticulous and compelling use of language
Eligibility
The Morley Safer Award competition was open to news agencies and independent reporters from the United States and Canada working in print, broadcast, radio or digital news media. Entries must have been published or broadcast between January 1 and December 31, 2018. Episodes from a series of stories entered for consideration must have been published or broadcast in 2018.
Application requirements
Candidates for the Morley Safer Award submitted their application materials directly online via the entry portal accessed from this webpage during the call for entries from January 1–February 28, 2019. A complete entry package included:
- A single news story or series of news stories with up to three episodes from a series uploaded in order of reporter preference.
- Names and contact information for all parties related to the application including the primary contact if different than the candidate, the reporter or project team lead, and up to three team members.
- A reporter, editor or producer’s statement of 350 words or less describing how the story met the selection criteria.
- Relevant media files with these technical requirements:
- Video: MP4 – 1080p SD or HD, H.264 preferred
- Audio: MP3 – Stereo or Mono
- Images: PNG (preferred), JPG/JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF
- Documents: PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPS, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, RTF, TXT
- Written materials in 12-point Times New Roman or similar font
- Individual files up to 25 MB each were accepted.
- Zipped files and watermark files were not accepted.
- Passwords to access files behind a firewall were required to be submitted with the application.
- Duplicate entries were considered once.
- An entrance fee of $100 payable online via major credit card at time of application. The entrance fee for stories nominated by a member of the Morley Safer Award Panel of Nominators was waived. Limited scholarship funds for freelance or independent reporters needing assistance were available.
- Zipped files and watermark files were not accepted.
- Duplicate entries were considered once.
- Fees for duplicate entries were not refunded.