An earlier version of this piece was included my traditionally overly self-indulgent 2022 EOTY list. I have since been nominated for another award, and have been asked to sit in as a jury member for others, and most recently someone publicly criticised one institution for allegedly snubbing me—even though said institution has tried to include me not once, but twice and complied with my request to not be included. To set the record straight and reiterate my arguments against awards for cultural journalists, I have reworked this essay.

In 2022, I groucho-marx’d my way out of two award nominations. In the first case, someone on the jury asked me directly via private message whether or not I was okay with being nominated for the prize and I declined. That was that. In the other case, one of my editors had submitted an article by me that ended up being on the shortlist and when I received an email from the jury that I had been nominated, I politely pointed out that, in the words of Taylor Swift, I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, please and thank you. 

The person with whom I was in contact about all of this was, perhaps understandably, surprised and asked me why. I provided my reasoning and even though the person on the other end said that they were interested in replying publicly, that never happened. I would have loved that conversation to take place, but felt like it would have been very, very pretentious of me to bring it up because it would come across like a weird humblebrag and also devaluate the work of instutions, jury members, and the folks who have been nominated for and/or received awards for their labour.

However, I think this it is worthy of discussion because it pertains to the truly fucked up status quo of cultural journalism. Let me preface this by saying that awards in general are a very idiotic concept to me and that is especially true in regards to anything that cannot be quantified. From discussions with colleagues I gathered that most people sort of agree with that notion, however awards remain incredibly popular in this field. I believe that has to do with the fact that they imply a sort of meritocracy: you only need to work hard to reap what you sow.

I have a few issues with this. 

Firstly, the piece that was nominated for the second award started as a group discussion on a Discord server. An editor contacted me separately to ask if I wanted to flesh out my Very Strong Opinions on the subject. We exchanged thoughts and I got to work, which means that I talked with other people about it and read up on it. All of that informed my writing before it even happened. Then my editor gave me feedback and we finetuned the thing before its publication. Yes, it appeared under only my byline, and I think that’s fine, but it would feel weird to take all the credit for it.

The text turned out to be a good one (whatever that means) because the resources to make that happen were available to me. I was able to dedicate time to it because I knew I would be paid for it relatively fairly and I was fortunate enough to work with an editor who had the resources to improve my work. This is simply not the case for a lot of freelancers, it’s not even the case for a lot of the pieces that I write for other publications. Had I written the same piece for a different publication, it would have turned out differently, and, I’d argue, worse (whatever that means).  

Every time shortlists with nominations for Very Good Articles are being published, you can tell from the publications in which they were published that the individual journalists had an advantage that, in comparison, a lot of their colleagues do not have. I was in an immensely privileged position to write that one article and it would feel odd to accept an award for it knowing that other people could have written something equally good (whatever that means) but lacked the time, resources, and/or access to publications that could have provided them with precisely that.

This brings me to my next point. When I declined the first nomination, the person who had asked me if I was okay with a nomination told me that they thought that I »would have deserved« to receive the prize. I loved hearing that, but couldn’t ignore that we had initially gotten to know each other while working on the same project years back and loosely stayed in touch or at least up to date with each other via social media in the following years. Also this is, in my view, an advantage I have over other people: connections. I would argue that they play a massive role in who gets nominated for what.

Let me illustrate this with an example. In 2022, I’ve seen a journalist being nominated for the second time in two years for a prize handed out by an association whose chairman they had been until a few years back. What seemed incredible to me is that no-one even addressed this massive conflict of interest when the nominations were announced. It’s just sort of taken for granted that people know other people, are involved with things, and then stuff like this happens. Sure, this is an extreme example, but at its core that is how the cookie crumbles everywhere.

Of course it is impossible for someone like me, who has been active in this field of work for roughly one and a half, to not know pretty much most jury members in some way, and I do not doubt that most awards try to be cognizant of this fact. Some even might work with anonymised submissions in order to give everyone a fair chance, but since those jury members likely keep tabs on people who end up being nominated, they will probably recognise their work anyhow. This is another advantage someone like me enjoys but that an up and coming intern does not.

What’s more, I’d argue that prizes are not only an expression of the power relations within our field of work, but actively fortify them. Most awards try to include younger voices, but those are regularly crammed into a side category, with the main ones occupied by people who are already relatively successful, i.e. have editorial backing, a brand if you will, connections, etc. What’s the point in making successful people even more successful? If this is about recognition, as the argument often goes, why does it need to take on this form; why do we as critical on-lookers cosplay as pop stars?

I’m not saying all this because I want to shit all over people who have been awarded prizes and were happy about it, especially not those whose careers were in fact boosted by that, or who received money. I’m not saying all this because I want to shit all over institutions who hand out these awards, presumably because they want Good Work to be recognised and celebrated, which is after all a nice enough notion. I’m not saying all this because I want to shit all over jury members who, as far as I know, put in a lot of often unpaid effort into making these things happen.

But this field of work has been in crisis for what now, a quarter of a century? Personally, I have lost several sources of income in 2025 alone, and I doubt that many of my colleagues have been faring very well in recent times. Privately owned publications are being discontinued, public broadcasters have to slash their budgets, the creator economy continues to be a superstar market that incentivises engagement farming over Good Work. The prospects are simply not great, and it feels disingenuous to me to put individuals on a pedestal while we are collectively going down.

This makes me wonder if we couldn’t invest all that labour, those resources, and indeed the money in infrastructural projects instead. Why are not trying to develop sturdier business models for new platforms, why are we not trying to ensure that aspiring journalists receive editorial backing and connections that older journalists like me can profit from? Why are we so obsessed with the band that plays while the Titanic sinks and not with getting the lifeboat ready? Why do we uphold a notion of meritocracy in which nobody, and I mean nobody, believes?

If you would ask me what my Best Piece of Work in these past few troubled years was, I would probably say that it wasn’t some essay on this musical trend, that large-scale research, or that opinion piece. I would probably say that it was setting up a Discord server for German-speaking cultural journalists in 2021, a place where we could come together to talk about our work, ask questions and receive answers, even start collaborations that would otherwise never have happened. As of today, maybe half a dozen people are still active there, but I appreciate their contributions immensly.

Because cultural journalism is usually a single-player game and while awards signal to us that it can be won, I do not think that is true. I’d rather MMORPG my way through it, which is why I’ll continue to groucho-marx my way out of any nomination, as well-intended as those might be. If you are a reader or listener and appreciate my work, send me an email and, better yet, get a subscription to one of the outlets for which I work. If you are an editor or someone else with a say at a publication, commission me. If you are a colleague reading this and would like to hop on the Discord, drop me a line. Maybe we can discuss some strategies to improve things for everyone.