Peabody Awards Officially Make Los Angeles Move, Set Date for In-Person Ceremony

The Peabody Awards are officially headed west.

The prestigious honors, recognizing excellence in storytelling across broadcast and digital media, will be celebrated at a Los Angeles event for the first time later this year.

The University of Georgia-based program originally planned to move its prestigious annual awards show to Los Angeles in early 2020. But the COVID-19 pandemic meant that the winners for 2020, 2021 and 2022 had to be celebrated virtually.

Now the Peabody Awards are ready to move forward with the L.A. move and Peabody’s first in-person awards ceremony since 2019.

The Peabody Awards have taken place in New York every year except its 50th anniversary, when the ceremony was held in Atlanta.

The awards are presented in the categories of arts, children’s and youth, documentary, entertainment, immersive and interactive media, news, podcast/radio and public service programming. With the in-person event this year, the digital and interactive storytelling category, which includes gaming, virtual reality and social video and was introduced last year, will be part of the main Peabody ceremony for the first time.

Peabody also announced Thursday that longtime NBC Nightly News anchor and correspondent John Seigenthaler will head up its board of jurors, which he’s served on for six years.

“It is a special honor to be part of this diverse and talented team of judges,” Seigenthaler said.  “The Peabodys are unique because we celebrate ‘stories that matter,’ in a complicated and ever-changing world.  Once again, we look forward to the challenging task of choosing the best of the best.”

Seigenthaler, who currently serves as a managing partner at communications firm Finn Partners, spent 11 years at NBC News, where he anchored the NBC Nightly News weekend edition and appeared on Meet The Press, Dateline, Today, Weekend Today, MSNBC, CNBC and Discovery Channel.  He also was an anchor and reporter for local ABC and NBC stations in Seattle and Nashville. He also serves on the Freedom Forum Advisory Board and the judging committee for the RFK Journalism Awards.

And Peabody has added documentary filmmaker, journalist and Sundance Institute’s documentary and artist program director Carrie Lozano to its board of directors. Lozano, who previously directed the International Documentary Association’s enterprise documentary and Pare Lorentz funds, is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and serves on the board of ProPublica and advisory boards of PBS Frontline and University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“Moving the Peabody Awards to Los Angeles, a city practically built on the power of storytelling, is an exciting evolution of Peabody’s commitment to curating the most powerful and moving stories told in broadcasting and digital media. Los Angeles gives us the opportunity to reimagine the awards show and incorporate more talent and presenters into a ceremony that promises to be nothing short of phenomenal,” said Peabody executive director Jeffrey Jones.

Nominees for the 2023 Peabody Awards will be announced in April with winners announced in May. All nominees must receive a unanimous vote by the Peabody Board of Jurors.

The 83rd Peabody Awards are set to take place on June 11 at L.A.’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel.