The best of the best

Prize-giving ceremony in the Russian embassy, Unter den Linden, Berlin. (twb)

During the past year a universe of programmes and productions have been broadcast and published. 235 of them, the very best, made it into this year's competition, 5835 voting sheets and 29.175 ratings were processed. The juries have spoken. These are the best of the best.

Success makes you lonesome they say. That's rubbish of course. You came here alone, and you go home accompanied by a bull. Well done!

Category	Title	Country
TV documentary	"Meet the Fokkens"	Netherlands
TV fiction	"We'll Take Manhattan"	UK
TV fiction serial	"The Bridge"	Sweden
TV current affairs	"Permission to Engage"	Netherlands
TV Iris (best multicultural TV programme)	"Special Flight"	Switzerland
TV marketplace of innovation	"Basta"	Belgium
Prix Genève Europe (best TV fiction script)	"Inside"	Netherlands
Languages Through Lenses (students' short films on learning languages)	"Snow White"	Netherlands
Radio documentary	"Holiday for Life – European Dementia Patients in Care in Thailand"	Austria
Radio investigation	"Radio Simoom"	Sweden
Radio fiction	"Category 5: How I Rescued Fats Domino From Hurricane Katrina"	Switzerland
Radio fiction serial	"1-Minute Small"	Netherlands
Radio music (programmes on music)	"Warsaw Variations"	UK
Radio marketplace of innovation	"Hackney Hear"	UK
Online	"The Art of Pho"	Netherlands
Best online innovation	diy.fm – "Radio à la Carte"	Switzerland
Prix Europa lifetime achievement award	Prof. Regina Ziegler	Germany

Sesame street

"Sesame Street", NDR/ARD

"Sesamstrasse" is the ARD kids' programme about to celebrate its 40th birthday in 2013. Its new website "Sesame Street" ("Sesamstrasse", NDR/ARD) is aimed at preschoolers and meant to be educational and amusing at the same time. A talking navigation, learning opportunities, educational games, tons of animations and mouseover effects: "Sesame Street", that funny world millions have grown up with, has gone online.

Catching the worm

"Early Birds", Vara, Netherlands

"The early bird catches the worm" (*) they say. "Early Birds" (Vara, Netherlands) is a large online platform for radio and TV shows, for user-generated content (both photos and videos), an interactive (Google-based) map, contests, the "green garden network" and Q&As about environmental matters and nature in general. Well, fresh.

(*) in German: "Der frühe Wurm hat einen Vogel."

Street art 2.0

"Défense d'afficher", France Télévisions

Street art can tell you a lot - about a country, an artist, and about life in general. "Défense d'afficher" (France Télévisions) is a web documentary about underground artists in eight cities around the world. Highly original and carefully crafted, "Défense d'afficher" provides a refreshing view on the making of what we seldom notice and hardly ever consider art.

Which of course is wrong.

Lessons in history

"Farewell Comrades!", Gebr. Beetz Filmproduktion Berlin,
ARD, ZDF

1991. The Cold War is over. "Farewell Comrades!" (Gebr. Beetz Filmproduktion Berlin, Arte, ZDF) was a six-part TV series backed up by a book project and web documentary taking the audience on an emotional journey through the former Soviet Union. It is a project about personal stories visualized by means of dozens of postcards written during the last 15 years of the USSR. Clicking a postcard will launch its writer's video portraits.

A remarkable web doc framed by extensive research: "Farewell Comrades!" is a thrilling history lesson on a former superpower, about everyday life in a country everyone thought it would last forever.

Transitions

"Transitions", DocAbout, Italy

"Transitions" (DocAbout, Italy) is about transgender men and women faced with discrimination wherever they go. The project ties TV and radio doc formats together and makes them a interactive fictional web series the storyline of which was determined by user votings. Touching but rather basic.

Play the game

"On the Ground Reporter",
Butch & Sundance Media, Netherlands

"On the Ground Reporter" (Butch & Sundance Media, Netherlands) is about journalism in areas of conflict and aims at high school students in the first place. The makers' missiion is interactive storytelling, and they consider their production a "documentary game". Videos, audios, 360-degree photos, many choices and a radio show to be made - "On the Ground Reporter" is a state-of-the-art point-and-click game aiming at involving the user in what media making is about.

However: An online game when it comes to Uganda, Afghanistan, Darfur, to famine and to war? Amazing, and yet irritating.

Day six: Multimedia again

Since it's the last day of the contest I'll go back to my favourite place again. Day six: Multimedia once more.

As you like it

"Diy.fm - Radio à la Carte", TPC Switzerland

"Diy.fm - Radio à la Carte" (TPC Switzerland) is, you might say, the online version of a simple radio. It does what any radio does, it allows you to listen to any programme you want. Okay, it does a bit more: It allows you also to combine music from your favourite radio station with the news of another and a podcast of yet another channel or one suggested to you by your friends.

Diy.fm is a radio, more precisely, a do-it-yourself radio. It is a smart audio player, plus a timer, plus a programme and podcast browser, plus a smart interface. Radio reloaded. Impressive.

Whodunnit?

"Tatort+: The Forest Stands Dark and Silent", SWR/ARD

"Tatort" TV whodunnits are being adored by millions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since 1970. But one broadcast (aired on May 13, 2012) was different from all the episodes before: It left the audience without unveiling the murderer.

"Tatort+: The Forest Stands Dark and Silent" ("Tatort+: Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget", SWR/ARD, archived version) extended the story beyond the TV screen and turned the audience into investigators. The extensive (now offline) point-and-click adventure game was massively spread on Facebook and Twitter and proved to be greatly successful. 110.000 users registered, more than 20.000 of them solved the case, in just one week.

(Which by the way was too much. The servers kept going down.)

A kids' world

"Ketnet", VRT

It is a kids' world: "Ketnet.be" (VRT) is a TV channel and an online platform aimed at 6 to 12-year olds, the website providing music, videos, games, polls, events - basically anything you might consider attractive for kids. (Including, of course, social network features.)

The main goal of "Ketnet.be" is to increase children's media literacy in a safe online surrounding. A full-blown kids' website. Uhm, nice.

After the storm

"Grasp the Disaster",
Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company

Science education matters, but it tends to be boring. So the Swedish educational broadcasters decided to go crossmedia. Instead of providing formula they built a platform dealing with real problem solving. "Grasp the Disaster" (Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company) wants to show what science really is about.

Students are getting involved by game-type missions in which they act as squad leaders in an emergency center after a natural disaster (such as severe water pollution, power supply breakdown, food shortages, or heavy storms) has struck the country. Apart from the game engine, the site provides different TV doc formats and loads of thrill. (And some theoretical backgrounds in physics, chemistry, biology of course.)

The world from above

"The Netherlands From Above"; VPRO

"The Netherlands From Above" (Stamen, San Francisco/VPRO) is a 10-part TV series showing the country from a bird's perspective. The online platform adds sophisticated interactive maps to it, providing spectacular data visualizations. Mobility, trade, housing prices, wild animals, travel times and cell phone activity during daytime, even flooding heights in case of catastrophe - every single map can be controlled by sliders and is displayed in real time.

A huge amount of data had to be processed and designed, and the result is stunning. A new dimension of data journalism.

Everyone is an artist

"DR Art Challenge", DR

"Everyone is an artist", Joseph Beuys used to say in the 1960s. For a full year, starting from Januar 1st 2012, every week "DR Art Club Challenge" (DR) invites amateur artists to meet specific challenges by painting, by writing texts, shooting photos and submitting their work to the DR platform. The website itself is meant to be a collective work of art, and the results are being presented in various DR radio and TV programmes. By the end of the year the best productions ("DR Art Club Challenger") will be selected.

For quite some time the DR has been successful in involving the audience in creating art. The "DR Art Challenge" is another fresh attempt of giving yet undiscovered artists the museum Joseph Beuys wanted them to have.

School TV reloaded

"NRK School", NRK

Every broadcaster has a strongroom called archive. For decades programmes, many of which broadcast a single time in history, have been archived and locked away from the public who actually owns them.

Out of the basement and right into the classroom: The Norvegian broadcasting company decided not just to open its archives, but to launch a new educational platform where archive content is properly categorized, tagged and linked to learning targets. "NRK School" (NRK) features about 5000 clips of free radio and TV content, adapted for teachers and students in primary, secondary and upper secondary school. Of course students can create and submit their own content as well.

Public broadcasting reloaded: "NRK School" is an interesting mix of online archive and blended learning.

Cut in two

"Portraits de frontières", Idfabrik, TV 5 monde

Kapikule (between Turkey and Bulgaria), Terespol (between Poland and Belarus), Vaalimaa (between Finland and Russia): These regions have one thing in common: their proximity to the EU border.

"Frontier portraits" ("Portraits de frontières", Idfabrik, TV 5 monde) is an interactive, multi-language documentary offering video portraits of people living near the border. "Normal people have a horizon of 360 degrees", one of the protagonists says. "Here at the border mine is limited to 180 degrees". The portraits are nicely embedded into panoramic photos and interactive maps, but the impressive part is the touching videos of people telling stories of a tough life cut in two by borders of many kinds.

Day four: Multimedia

Today the multimedia jury meets for the first time, and till Friday evening Europe's best online production will be presented and discussed. So what am I going to do today? Make an intelligent guess.

Where is the blogger?

Radio documentary jury, discussing. (Jan Kopetzky)

Picture puzzle: Where is the blogger?

And the winners are...

Prix Europa 2011 award ceremony: The winners on stage. (twb)

So these are the winners of this year's Prix Europa, that amazing media festival awarding the best of the best public service productions: Congratulations! Well done! By today you belong to Europe's best media makers.

(And tidy up your desk – the Prix Europa bull will need some space.)

• TV Documentary: The Snow Ball War Darkness (Norway), Enemy Engagement (Germany)
• TV Current Affairs: Lost Honour – The Story of the Sürücü Family (Germany)
• TV Fiction: Sherlock – A Study In Pink (United Kingdom), The Strongest Man in Holland (The Netherlands)
• Prix Geneve Europe (best TV fiction script): Combat Girls (Germany)
• TV Iris (best multicultural TV programme): Winter of Love (The Netherlands)
• Languages Through Lenses (students' short films on learning languages): The Importance of Speaking Two Languages (Italy)
• Radio Documentary: My Grandfather’s Doublelife (Denmark), Ladies of the Manor – Scenes from a Marriage of Convenience (Austria)
• Radio Fiction: Tacet (Silence 2) (Germany), Home Goal (France)
• Radio Music (programmes on music): WDR 3 Favourites (Germany)
• Online: Nowhere Safe (France)
• Lifetime Achievement Award Radio: Raina Konstantinova (EBU)

The Top Five

Whatever production has made it to the Prix Europa, you will agree, belongs to the best productions there are. Yet, not any of them can win one of the bulls. So here is what the jurys have considered the top five of any category, the very essence of this year's Prix Europa.