On Friday evening, the “International Music Journalism Award” 2022 was presented at the Reeperbahn Festival. Various outstanding journalistic works and journalists were nominated in the following categories:
1. The Best Music Journalist of the Year – German / English / French
2. The Year’s Best Work of Music Journalism
a) Text (Print & Web) – German / English / French
b) Audio – German / English / French
c) Multimedia – German / English
3. New Perspective – The Year’s Best Work of Music Journalism, Under 30 – German
Joachim Hentschel won the prize in the supreme discipline in the German category as the best music journalist of the year. Hentschel is a freelance author for Rolling Stone and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others. This year he published his new book “Then we are heroes: How German politics was made with pop music over the wall”.
Authors from MUSIKEXPRESS were also nominated several times, including Julia Friese and Stefan Hochgesand. ME editor Annett Scheffel even received an award: she won a prize in the category for her text about the New Zealand pop singer Lorde from the Musikexpress issue 09/2021 “The Year’s Best Work Of Music Journalism (Text – German)” . She prevailed against the following nominees:
DANIEL GERHARDT Drakeo the Ruler. thanks for nothing – ALL CAPS
STEFAN HOCHGESAND Queer Heroes – Musikexpress
ANNET SCHEFFEL The fine art of not giving a shit – Musikexpress
PAUL SCHWENN, MARKUS SEHL Kolja Goldstein: Exaggeratedly crass – The time
JOHANN VOIGT The province does too – time online
Why did the jury choose Scheffel’s text? Susanne Baller explains it in her laudation as follows:
“If an author manages to inspire readers with a portrait of an artist, even though they have never been a fan of her music before, if she arouses curiosity and tempts her to listen to the songs again through her article, then she has achieved her goal reached. Annett Scheffel succeeded in doing this with her piece about the New Zealand musician Lorde. She used the release of her third album, “Solar Power”, in 2021 to trace the development of the now 25-year-old, whose musical career began ten years earlier.
Scheffel’s text for the Musikexpress, “The fine art of giving a shit”, lovingly describes an artist who eludes the market and the social media world and only returns when she feels ready for it. Lorde thus represents the part of her generation that refuses to consume, buys second-hand and lives off-grid. Scheffel manages to pan between the video call to New York City, which depicts a dreamy young woman who looks out of the window during the call and tells what is happening on the street between the brownstones, and a scene change to the interview in which Ella Yelich-O’ Connor (Lorde) tells about New Zealand, her second home NYC, a trip to Antarctica and her genesis through music genres as well as a look at the really important things: nature, friends, swimming in the sea.
Without Annett Scheffel we would never have found out about it so sensitively.”
One Overview of all nominees and winners of this year’s International Music Journalism Award can be found here.