Meet the judges

Graeme Whitfield
Editor, The Journal & Chair of the Judging Panel

Graeme Whitfield is editor of The Journal and business editor for Reach in the North East, covering The Journal, The Chronicle, The Gazette and their websites, as well as overseeing North East content for the BusinessLive site. He has worked at Reach since 1998 and has previously held roles including news editor and Northumberland editor.

Other panel members will be announced soon

The judging process


After entries close in June, all the nominations will be collated and then sorted according to postcode into the following sub-regional areas:

~ Northumberland & Tyneside

~ Durham, Sunderland & South Tyneside

~ Teesside


Our distinguished judging panel will be sent the nominations to review and will then meet in July to select a winner for each of the 10 award categories in each sub-regional area - resulting in three winners for each category.

A second round of judging will then take place to decide which of the three sub-regional winners becomes the overall category winner for the North East.

The sub-regional winners will be announced in a special feature published online on ChronicleLive and TeessideLive, and in print in The Journal and The Gazette.

All sub-regional winners are then invited to the Grand Final at Hardwick Hall on 25th September where the overall North East winners will be announced. 

The judging panel is made up of representatives from the headline and associate partners, Reach plc, independent local business leaders and previous award winners.