The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), a partner in the IJ4EU fund, has announced the five jury members of the third annual IJ4EU Impact Award.

The jury met earlier this month to choose three winners for Europe’s only award devoted to cross-border investigative journalism. Winners will be announced on March 31.

The award ceremony will serve as a grand finale to the MFRR Summit 2023, the annual gathering of the Media Freedom Rapid Response mechanism, which supports and protects journalists in EU member states and candidate countries.

The ceremony will be live-streamed on ECPMF’s YouTube channel.

Here are the members of the IJ4EU Impact Award 2023 jury.

Joanna Krawczyk (chair) specialises in building socially impactful development strategies and projects for media, civil society organisations and philanthropic foundations. She is Deputy Managing Director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she focuses on the Modern Marshall Plan for Ukraine and strengthening democracy and security in Central and Eastern Europe. She is also a member of the Management Board of the European Media and Information Fund, which supports media and civil society groups combating disinformation.

Previously, she was Head of News Partnerships in Poland’s biggest legacy newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and the President of Gazeta Wyborcza Foundation, where she established the first Investigative Reporting Grant Scheme in Poland, the Local Media Development Programme, and also initiated and ran the European-wide Ukrainian Media Fund. She was also the Chair of the Leading European Newspaper Alliance. Under her leadership, the Gazeta Wyborcza Foundation was awarded the Golden Pen of Freedom Award by the World Association of News Publishers.

Eric Chauvistré is a professor of journalism at Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Science. After working at foreign policy research institutes in Berlin and Canberra, he entered the world of journalism as a news editor with Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) and Reuters. For many years, he contributed to a wide range of media outlets covering military affairs and armed conflict. Eric holds a PhD in international relations and is a former monitoring officer with the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe in Eastern Ukraine.

Ekaterina Mandova has for the past three years supported independent public-interest journalism organisations on their way to building resilience as part of her role in Civitates, a collaborative fund for democracy and solidarity in Europe. Before joining Civitates, Ekaterina worked for different organisations on topics related to social and environmental issues. Throughout the years, she has been involved in different journalistic projects and initiatives around Europe. As a journalist, she has worked for private and community media outlets in Bulgaria and Austria.

Aiko Kempen is an investigative journalist based in Leipzig, Germany. As part of the investigations team at FragDenStaat, he takes part in national and international media collaborations and makes official government documents publicly accessible – including the classified “NSU-Files”. He teaches investigative research at Hamburg’s Akademie für Publizistik.

Iliana Papangeli is the managing director of Solomon, an investigative news outlet based in Athens. She is a journalist and editor specialising in migration. She was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2021 and won the IJ4EU Impact Award in 2022. She has participated in several cross-border investigations and her work has been published in media across Europe. At university, she studied psychology and social anthropology.


The ceremony will be live-streamed on ECPMF’s YouTube channel.