The third time was a charm. For the third year in a row, The Club featured a celebrity journalist interview rather than a keynote address at the Annual Awards Dinner. On Thursday, May 16, the Managing Editors of The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine engaged in a spirited conversation at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The evening included the announcement of the winners in the Annual Awards Contest. Click here for the list of winners and finalists.
PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
Gerard Baker, who stepped up to become Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones & Co. and Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal at the beginning of this year, was interviewed by Andy Serwer, the Managing Editor of Fortune. This was one of Baker’s first opportunities to address hundreds of New York journalists since taking the helm of Dow Jones.
Baker is a veteran English newsman, with decades of experience at the BBC and on Fleet Street. From 2009 through the beginning of this year, he was the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Journal, which is the largest U.S. newspaper. In his new role, Baker oversees Dow Jones’ global news staff of 2,000 journalists in more than 80 bureaus worldwide. Serwer is responsible for Fortune’s magazine, digital media and conferences. He is a regular guest on MSNBC’S Morning Joe and CNBC’s Squawkbox, and from 2001 to 2006 he served as the business anchor for CNN’s American Morning.
Their chat was recorded, and will be distributed through this website. Previous newsmaker interviews are available for viewing now. The Club was honored to host interviews with Steve Kroft by Stephen Shepard (video) in 2012 and with Tina Brown by Keith Kelly (video) in 2011.
Scholarships
During the event, The Deadline Club Foundation, which is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational foundation, awarded $10,000 in scholarships to four outstanding journalism students studying in New York. They each received scholarships worth $2,500 and were invited to attend the awards dinner as the guests of The Deadline Club. The scholarship winners are Liyan Chen, a graduate student from China who is studying at New York University’s Business and Economic Reporting Program, Craig Giammona, a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Adrienne Berard and Julia Harte, both students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. (Learn more about this year’s scholarship winners.)
The Club’s scholarship fund continues to grow, in large part because of the success of the awards program, which supports the scholarships. This was the first year there were four scholarship winners, up from three winners in each of the prior two years. As always, the evening not only benefited the scholarship fund, but also provided important support for the events and programming produced throughout the year by The Deadline Club, which is the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Awards
The conversation between Baker and Serwer was followed by the presentation of the club’s coveted “Rube” statuettes. The American artist and cartoonist Rube Goldberg designed these off-kilter sculptures to look like a “dead line.” The Deadline Club has bestowed them upon the winners of its annual awards competition since 1968.
“The contest was particularly challenging to judge this year, with a record 500 entries,” said J. Alex Tarquinio, President of The Deadline Club. “The work covered such crucial topics as the rise of China, corporate malfeasance and threats to public health and safety.”
The entries were considered by more than 80 judges, including many of the city’s best and brightest writers, editors, photographers and producers working in the profession today. Click here for the list of this year’s judges.
The 2013 awards show recognized work that was published or broadcast in 2012, when media outlets focused their lenses on many far-flung issues, from a brewing epidemic of drug-resistant TB in India to the appalling working conditions in iPhone factories in China. Closer to home, they looked at shortfalls in public services, from housing to healthcare to higher education. Many of the works dealt with the protracted agonies of local residents after Superstorm Sandy.
This year, the prestigious Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Journalism went to David Barboza of The New York Times, for his courageous reporting in China about the financial dealings of the premier’s relatives. The Public Service Award was given to the staff of The Wall Street Journal for timely and incisive reporting about threats to personal privacy in a series called “Watched.”