The Peabody Awards will announce winning projects from its new digital and interactive storytelling awards on March 24, the awards body announced Monday.
The Peabody Awards first unveiled its new interactive storytelling categories last June, as a way of recognizing how online storytelling forms have advanced and grown in the last few years. The awards body also announced the creation of a new interactive board that will screen projects for the awards categories, which will honor exemplary achievements in gaming, interactive journalism, interactive documentary, virtual reality, augmented reality, social video and transmedia storytelling.
In addition to the date announcement, the Peabody Awards have added four new members to its Interactive Board: Gabriel J.X Dance, the deputy investigations editor for the New York Times, who reports on privacy and safety online; Yasmin Elayat, co-founder of immersive filmmaking company Scatter; Navid Khonsari, whose company iNK Stories produces games, virtual reality and immersive experiences; and Opeyemi Olukemi, executive director of the Center of Documentary Studies in Dunham, N.C. With the addition of these four, the jury that will select the winners in the interactive storytelling categories now totals fourteen members.
“The works in this new category are fundamentally changing how we engage with storytelling, and therein changing us,” Peabody Interactive Board Chairwoman Williams said in a statement. “It’s imperative that we recognize the projects that have catalyzed and revolutionized how media is seen, understood, engaged with and disseminated. We hope that honoring these legacy winners will continue to push forward our mission of supporting ambitious, groundbreaking creators who strive to make projects with stories that are not only entertaining but can also perhaps prompt visible, societal shifts.”
The first winners of the Peabodys’ digital and interactive storytelling winners will be announced at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET on March 24, on peabodyawards.com