A street interviewer using TikTok and YouTube to tell stories of homelessness in Sydney, a scientist tweet-threading information about tar balls and a front page story in The Australian about the threat to Indigenous archeological sites on the Nullarbor are among the diverse nominees shortlisted by UTS journalism students for the Central News Media Prize 2025.

The Prize, now in its second year, honours what UTS journalism students thought was the best piece of journalism in Australia in 2024 from all platforms, with an emphasis on engagement, innovation, inspiration and best practice.

Amid dozens of entries, including text, video, audio and social media, the shortlist of six nominees is:

@thepostmodernjournalist, TikTok. ‘Seeing Sydney’s homeless’

Zacharias Szumer, SBS. ‘Hannah’s son was put in a box’

Jon Beves, Twitter. ‘Analysing Coogee’s mystery tar balls’

Christine Middap, The Australian. ‘Like dropping a brick on a meringue’

Stephanie Tran & Eve Cogan, Declassified Australia. ‘Revealed: The Pentagon’s infiltration of Australian unis’

Alicia Bridges, ABC. ‘Mr Big’

The awards ceremony will be held at the Abercrombie Hotel on March 12, where the winner will be announced after being judged by a panel of students, who themselves have won awards over the past year for their journalism.

This year’s judges are Frances Du (JERAA Award winner), Ike Morris (JERAA Award winner), Yasmine Alwakal (Kennedy Award winner), Caitlin Maloney (NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications award winner) and Media Prize editors Ebony Brown and Ainslee McNally.

Student awards for best practice in the Central News newsroom and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences awards for academic excellence, will also be given out on the night.

For any enquiries email Media Prize 2025 editors Ebony Brown on Ebony.E.Brown@student.uts.edu.au or Ainslie McNally on Ainslie.F.McNally@student.uts.edu.au.

Past winners

Media Prize 2024

The winner of the inaugural Media Prize in 2024 was an immersive piece of multimedia journalism that took readers/viewers on ‘a journey’ through a major urban building fire.

‘Razed’ by the ABC NSW and Innovations teams used video, photography and animated graphics of the old hat factory building in Surry Hills that was gutted by fire in May last year, to comprehensively tell the story of how the fire happened, weaving in historical facts and eyewitness accounts in a longform, parallax scrolling feature.

The Prize was judged by journalism students at UTS, who sorted through dozens of stories, videos and podcasts nominated over the previous year.

ABC journalists Jack Fisher and Katia Shatoba accepted the prize at an awards night on March 20. Their colleagues Harriet Tatham, Catherine Hanrahan and Julia Feder were all honoured by an audience of nearly 100 UTS journalism students for their work on the project.

To read the full story about the award, the other nominees and the awards night at the Abercrombie Hotel CLICK HERE.

Judges 2024: Pamela Rontziokis, winner of the Walkley’s Student Journalist of the Year 2024 and the Crikey Award for Investigative Journalism, JERAA Ossie Awards 2023; Suhayla Sharif, winner of the Alan Knight Award for Student Journalist of the Year at the 2023 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards; Jonathan Weitz-Freeman, winner of the Democracy’s Watchdogs Award 2023 for Investigative Journalism; Rex Siu, Media Prize Editor; Ayesha Baig, Media Prize Editor.

Main image Central News.