Four Winners Slated For New Media Writing Prize 2016

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Four winners are expected to emerge for  The New Media Writing Prize (NMWP), an annual award and ceremony which encourages and promotes the best in new media writing.

It showcases inventive and exciting stories that integrate a variety of formats, platforms and digital media.
The competition is open to all including students, professionals, artists, writers, developers, designers or enthusiasts.

For the 2016 competition, there will be four prizes: the Main Prize, the Student Prize, the Dot Award, and the Gorkana Journalism Awards. The Main Prize is worth £1000 donated by if:book UK; Student Prize: 3 months paid internship at Unicorn Training, Bournemouth, UK, working with Unicorn’s writing and design team; the Dot Award is £500 to get a new project started, also donated by if:book UK; while the Gorkana Journalism Award, donated by Gorkana consist of two awards: the UK award, and the International award, both £500 for the winner.

Each of the awards categories has different, albeit related interests. The Main Prize and the Student Prize are looking for good storytelling (fiction or non-fiction) written specifically for delivery and reading/viewing on a PC or Mac, the web, or a hand-held device such as an iPad or mobile phone. It could be a short story, novel, poem, documentary or transmedia work using words, images, film or animation with audience interaction.

The Dot Award will be awarded for a project idea which, in the judges’ opinion, shows promise and practicability – and could be completed by the end of 2016. Projects which aren’t necessarily technically complex but do create original and exciting literary work inspired by the affordances of the web, blogs, apps, social media etc. Chris Meade and if:book UK will liaise with the winner to support the project, which will be showcased at the 2016 New Media Writing Prize award ceremony (to be announced later but probably January 2017).

The Gorkana Journalism Awards, the first of its kind, honour innovative stories based on factual material and featuring digital media. Interactive documentaries, multimedia features and serious games are all considered. Entries must incorporate new media technologies and platforms.

The interactivity is key to the awards as it is to the new-media storytelling; combining any number of media elements, such as words on a screen combined with images and video clips is a key point. Ease of accessibility for the reader/viewer, effective use of interactive elements, a great example of how new media can do things traditional media can’t, and the potential to reach out to a wide audience (i.e. not just specialist interest groups) are some of the scoring points.

The awards discourage entries such as text-only story/poem which you can upload to a webpage or place on a disc, screens of words uploaded to your blog, or a slideshow of photos uploaded to Flickr or a video uploaded to YouTube. The essence of new-media writing for is great storytelling which uses anything and everything that digital media can offer, along with user/audience interactivity. It’s got to be something that couldn’t work in ‘old’ media.

Interested candidates can visit http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/ for details of how to apply.
Deadlines vary according to awards.