The Sigma Awards is a competition to celebrate the best data journalism from around the world.
Striding into its fifth year, it’s also here to empower, elevate and enlighten the global community of data journalists.
The international data journalism community is facing many challenges, and we want to support them. We want to bring together a community, and support those working with data, whether it’s on climate change or international conflicts – because that’s one of the priorities for our community at the moment – or on any other subject.
The 2024 edition of The Sigma Awards received 591 entries from 322 organizations in 78 countries, and 6 regions.
This year The Sigma Awards are hosted by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN).
Through this edition, we would like to continue highlighting the very best data journalism being done around the world. A multitude of compelling projects have been released over the past few months, in all regions. We want to celebrate that great work, share it with our community, and get journalists to get inspired and learn from each other’s successes.
We also aim to continue building a community that endures beyond the awards themselves, and share resources tackling the real urgent issues met by journalists today such as where to find data about crisis in their city/country/region, what’s to know when working with a specific type of data, what tools to use, how do others deal with the day-to-day challenges of working such data, etc.
The Sigma Awards aims to unite, galvanize and expand data journalism communities around the world. Core to this project is the ambition to ignite collaborations and discussions between members of our community on key topics for society.
To that end, winners will be brought together to participate in and lead online data journalism panels, discussions and workshops organized by GIJN and other members from the community.
They will not only learn from each other, but will be reaching out to the broader community of data journalists and would-be data journalists, building relationships that will help spark better collaborations and work around the world.
A US$ 5,000 cash prize will also be split amongst the winners, who will each get a certificate suitable for framing.
The Sigma Awards competition was created in 2019 by Aron Pilhofer (Star Tribune) and Gina Chua (Semafor), with support from Simon Rogers (Google), Marianne Bouchart (HEI-DA), and Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (Pulitzer Center), also supported by the Google News Initiative.
In 2025, GIJN became the host of the Sigma Awards.