2025 AAJA Awards - Excellence in Written Reporting, News
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This award recognizes excellence in a news story (or series of stories) of national, regional or local significance. Stories will be judged for compelling subject matter, strength of reporting and sourcing, and fresh angles of topics with heavy media coverage. Submissions are welcome from journalists, newsrooms, wire services, magazines, journals and other professional outlets.
Deadline for submission February 12, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. ET.
General Eligibility Requirements
Entries that are eligible for the 2025 AAJA Journalism Excellence Awards were published or aired between Jan. 1 - Dec. 31 of the previous year (2024).
Photo(s) must have been either created or initially published between January 1st and December 31st of 2024.
For a series or project that spans multiple years, you may submit the project one time for one of the eligible years. For instance, a project that was published in 2023-2024 is eligible for the 2025 awards as long as it wasn’t entered in AAJA’s 2024 Journalism Excellence Awards. Works previously entered into the AAJA Awards will not be considered.
Work must be published in English (or in the case of video, with English subtitles).
It must fall in the listed categories for the Journalism Excellence Awards.
It must not be student work (except for Student Journalism categories).
Entrants are limited to AAJA members only, however, journalists may join the organization prior to submitting their awards application. AAJA is open to all journalists, regardless of ethnic or racial identity.
An entry is a journalism project executed by a single journalist or a team of journalists. For team submissions, at least one member of the team who played a significant role in the submitted work must be an AAJA member. The person who submits the award application must be an AAJA member.
Each entered work may only be submitted to one award category. Please use your discretion.
Journalists may submit multiple pieces, but not the same piece to multiple categories.
If the work is part of a series, you may submit up to three pieces from that series together as one entry; this is applicable to the Written Journalism, Online/Digital Journalism and the topical categories.
To learn more, visit our website.