Monday, December 06, 2004

BIG AWARD FOR BARON. Boston Globe editor Martin Baron will be honored as the 2004 Beveridge Editor of the Year, according to this Associated Press report (via Romenesko). According to the website of the National Press Foundation, which awards the Beveridge, "The award is open to an editor at any level, is made in recognition of imagination, professional skill, ethics and an ability to motivate staff - qualities that produce excellence in media."

Other National Press Foundation winners are Tim Russert and Seymour Hersh.

A couple of sidelights about Baron's award:

- The 2003 winner was Sandra Mims Rowe, the editor of the Oregonian. Rowe had been a candidate to succeed retiring Globe editor Matt Storin in the summer of 2001 before publisher Richard Gilman turned to Baron, then the executive editor of the Miami Herald and a veteran of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

- The 2002 winner was Howell Raines, then the executive editor of the New York Times. Of course, in 2003 Raines was forced to resign over his brutal mismanagement of the Jayson Blair scandal. In May 2004, the Atlantic Monthly published a monumental post-mortem by Raines in which, among other things, he cited Baron as a model:

[T]he feverish pace also underscored some of my weaknesses. One of these is to respond to great staff effort by demanding that the next day we do "more, better, faster" in the words of Martin Baron, the similarly inclined editor of The Boston Globe.

That drew a letter from Baron, published in the July/August issue that began:

Howell Raines endeavors to pull me into his orbit by invoking my desire to get "more, better, faster" from a newsroom. Having never worked for or with him, I can't speak from experience about his approach to managing a news staff. I imagine our styles differ quite a bit.

My model (and mentor) is his predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, who is deplorably mistreated and inaccurately portrayed in Raines's assessment of The New York Times.

Somehow I don't think Baron and Raines will be sitting together at the awards dinner.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Russert deserves nothing. His failure to reveal to the NBC audience that he knew that Edwards and VP DC had met and spoke on the Meet the Press set was shameful to the news profession. He left it out,presumably, because NBC was polling in the aftermath of the Veep debate and he didn't want to say that Dick lied. The next morning with a big smile on his face big Tim said sure he knew that it was a fib and that Dick had met Edwards. Russert,the highly rated currupt pundit, is an overrated newsman.