Tomasz Lis won the prestigious title of the Journalist of the Year 2009. The statuette was presented to him at the Grand Press 2009 gala held in the Warsaw Hilton hotel. The event was organized by the ‘Press’ monthly and supported by PRESS-SERVICE Monitoring Mediów.
It was already the thirteenth edition of this important media event. Grand Press has been held since 1997 and throughout this time Tomasz Lis won the main award three times – for the first time in 1999, and then jointly with Marcin Kącki in 2007. This time the winner donated his prize – Citroen C5 – to The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy).
Lis was just one vote ahead of Ewa Ewart, who was ranked second. This year 59 editorial teams participated in the vote, which is the biggest number in the history of the event.
Apart from the Journalist of the Year 2009, the winners of eight other categories were chosen. Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski from ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ obtained the Grand Press award for the best press feature. Their article printed in June in the ‘Duży Format’ supplement told the story of the South Korean Ambassador in Poland, who is Kim Il Sung’s son and a stepbrother of Kim Jong Il. The radio feature “Carousal” bringing back the memories of a party held in the editorial room of ‘Przyjaciółka’ in 1967 which became a pretext for anti-Semite opinions uttered by Władysław Gomółka won in the category of the Best Radio Feature. It was created by Magdalena Skawińska from Channel 1 of Polskie Radio. Michał Matys (TVP1) was awarded for the best TV feature. He made a documentary about the strike of textile workers in Łódź in 1971.
The Grand Press award for the best investigative journalist was given to Wojciech Cieśla (‘Dziennik’) for the article “How does Transparency International make money?”. In the category of social and political journalism the jury awarded Jan Hartman for his article concerning the Polish-Jewish relations which was published by ‘Tygodnik Powszechny’. The title of the Interview of the Year was given to the shocking interview made by Angelika Kuźniak with Herta Mueller “I exercised death” (‘Duży Format’). Magdalena Grzebałkowska’s article “I love you. Let’s kill the husband” (‘Duży Format’) was awarded the main prize in the category of specialist journalism. The award for the best news went to Szymon Jadczak and Maciej Kuciel from TVN, who disclosed the illegal deliveries of over twenty-year-old Swedish meat to Polish schools, nurseries, and orphanages.
Grand Press is one of the biggest journalist events in Poland and is supposed to integrate the media environments. Its prestige is bigger and bigger every year. The data collected by PRESS-SERVICE Monitoring Mediów suggests that the interest of mass media in the 2009 gala was bigger than in 2008.
