Yesterday saw the launch of the first (surprisingly) international data journalism awards, backed by the European Journalism Centre*, Google, and the Global Editors Network.

There are 6 awards – 3 categories, each split into national/international and local/regional subcategories: investigative journalism; visualisation; and apps.

Each comes with prize money of 7,500 euros.

The closing date for entries is April 10. It’s particularly good to see a jury and pre-jury that isn’t dominated by Anglo-American traditional media, so if your work is unconventionally innovative it stands a decent chance of making it through. There’s also no specification on where your work is published, so students and independent journalists can enter.

The one thing I’d like to see in future years is the ‘visualisation and storytelling’ category expanded to include non-visual storytelling – there’s a tendency to reach for visualisation as a way to communicate data when other methods could be just as, or more, engaging.

*Declaration of interest: I am on the editorial board for the EJC’s Data Driven Journalism project.