The world’s largest organization of Earth and space scientists, the American Geophysical Union, is accepting nominations for its 2017 journalism awards through 15 March 2017. This year, AGU plans to present the three awards listed below. The authoritative statements of the rules governing these awards are available at the included links. Submissions for all three awards should be made through AGU’s online nomination system [https://honors.agu.org/nominations]. Please see instructions for using the online nomination system at the bottom of this release or at https://news.agu.org/files/2017/01/Submitting-a-nomination-for-an-AGU-journalism-award.pdf

David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism — News [http://honors.agu.org/medals-awards/david-perlman-award-for-excellence-in-science-journalism%E2%80%94news], recognizing excellence in science news reporting, generally produced under deadline pressure of one week or less. It is named for David Perlman, Science Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Submit a nomination: https://honors.agu.org/nominations

Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism — Features [http://honors.agu.org/medals-awards/walter-sullivan-award-for-excellence-in-science-journalism-features], recognizing excellence in science feature reporting, generally produced under a deadline of longer than one week. It is named for the late Walter Sullivan of The New York Times, who was the first recipient of the award. Submit a nomination: https://honors.agu.org/nominations

Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism [http://honors.agu.org/medals-awards/robert-c-cowen-award-for-sustained-achievement-in-science-journalism], recognizing journalists who have made significant, lasting, and consistent contributions to accurate reporting on the Earth and space sciences for the general public. Established in 1991, the award has been named since 2001 for Robert C. Cowen, longtime science editor (now retired) of The Christian Science Monitor. Submit a nomination: https://honors.agu.org/nominations

The Perlman and Sullivan awards each honor specific stories reported by journalists in the past year (i.e., 2017 awards honor 2016 stories). Journalists are welcome to nominate their own work for these awards, or someone may nominate a story on the reporter’s behalf. A nominee may submit only one entry for each award in a given year (i.e., one entry for the Perlman and one entry for the Sullivan). Each award consists of a plaque and a $5,000 award.

For the Perlman and Sullivan awards, nominations may be from any country, in any language (English translation required), and in any news medium, except books. Entries will be judged by how well they meet one or more of the following three criteria: Brings new information or concepts about AGU sciences to the public’s attention, identifies and corrects misconceptions about AGU sciences, and makes AGU sciences accessible and interesting to general audiences, without sacrificing accuracy. The Sullivan award selection committee will also consider accuracy, initiative, originality and clarity.

The Cowen Award celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on Earth and space sciences. Only AGU members may submit nominations for the award, which is presented no more often than every two years. The Cowen Award consists of a glass globe on a base with an engraved plate.

The deadline to submit nominations for AGU’s 2017 journalism awards is 15 March 2017. AGU will present the awards on 13 December 2017 at the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Contact:
Nanci Bompey
+1 (202) 777-7524
nbompey@agu.org

Instructions for using the online nomination system:
To submit a nomination, login to the online nomination system [https://honors.agu.org/nominations] using your AGU account. If you do not have an AGU account, you will need to create one by selecting the “Sign me up as a new user” and filling out the required information. (If your organization is not listed or can’t be found, please enter Organization Not Listed in the “Organization Name” field and fill out the “Suggest Your Organization” field with the name of your organization.)

After logging in to the nomination system, click on the blue “View Awards” button. Use the “Filters” menu to select “Journalism.” You will see a listing of the three journalism awards. Click on the title of each award for more information about the individual award.

To submit a nomination for an award, click the “Create Submissions” button that corresponds to the award you would like to submit a nomination for.

You will then be taken to the submission page for the award. Complete the two forms (tasks) at the top of the screen: The “Main Nominee Information” form, followed by the submission form for the award (this is the form with the name of the award). You must complete the “Main Nominee Information” form before filling out the submission form for the award. To start filling out the form, either click the name of the form or the start button that corresponds to the form.

After completing these two forms, you can upload entries not available online, transcripts for radio and TV stories or translations for non-English stories at the bottom of the page. Scroll down past the award information text to find this task: “Upload entries not available online, transcripts (for radio and TV) or translations (for non-English stories).” After uploading your files, click the “Back to Submission” button to return to the award submission page and complete your submission. If you do not have any items to upload, you can skip this step.

Nominations for the Cowen Award also must include a nomination letter. Upload this letter by clicking on the “Upload Nomination Letter” task at the bottom of the page. (Scroll down past the award information text.) After uploading a nomination letter, you will be taken to a preview screen. Press the “back” button at the top of the screen to return to the award submission page.

For the Cowen Award, you can also upload examples of work not available online using the “Upload examples of outstanding reporting (if not available online)” task at the bottom of the page. After uploading your files, click the “Back to Submission” button to return to the award submission page and complete your submission.

After you have completed the required forms and uploaded the required documents, click on the “Submit your application” button at the bottom of the page. (If you did not upload any items, you can still submit the nomination even though the “upload” section says “incomplete”).

You will be asked to confirm your submission on the next page. Click “Continue” to submit your nomination. You will receive an email confirming your submission.

To submit an additional nomination, click on the “Back to account” button. Click on the blue “View Awards” button at the bottom of the page to view all the awards and create additional nominations. For the Perlman and Sullivan awards, a nominee may submit only one entry for each award in a given year (i.e. one entry for the Perlman and one entry for the Sullivan).

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