Bayeux, the first town in France that the Allies liberated in 1944, launched this annual international event in the framework of the 50^th anniversary of D-Day in 1994. Its purpose is to award journalists from around the world prestigious prizes in four media: the written press, radio, television and photography. In addition to the awards ceremony, the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy award for war correspondents offers a week of exchanges, encounters and debates with the public (young and less young) to take the time to understand international news better.

The various activities (evenings, book fair, exhibitions, etc.) focus on notorious and more obscure conflicts and shed light on the news and on the reporter’s profession in the presence of people who cover violent conflicts all over the world year round. The journalists gathering for the occasion and the quality of exchanges with television, radio, print and photo reporters make the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award an incomparable event.

To ensure that the names of the journalists killed in the line of duty are never forgotten, the City of Bayeux, in collaboration with Reporters without borders, is welcoming a Memorial entirely dedicated to reporters killed across the world since 1944.“This is the only place in the world where my husband’s name is written in stone,” declared Michèle Montas, the widow of the Haitian journalist Jean Dominique, on the inauguration of the first phase of the memorial on 7 October 2006.This unique space in Europe will be opened in its entirety on 2 May 2007. It has been designed and built by the architect and landscape designer Samuel Craquelin. It consists of a landscaped promenade punctuated with 27 white stones, on which are engraved the names of more than 2,000 journalists who paid with their lives in their bid to keep us informed.This concrete fixture perpetuates throughout the year – over and above the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents – the City’s commitment to defending freedom of the press and democracy.

More than 2,000 journalists have been killed since 1944. They are now honoured and commemorated on the Internet in an online memorial. It will be possible for anyone to find out who these journalists were, who they worked for and how they met their deaths. It will be a memorial to keep their names alive and has been conceived and created by the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, Reporters without Borders and the town of Bayeux. The new memorial brings together the names of the 2,069 media professionals killed while carrying out their duties since 1944. It will be a database unique of its kind in its size and the amount of information it provides about each of these men and women.