Neuharth wins lifetime achievement award
By freedomforum.org staff
02.25.00
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WASHINGTON — USA TODAY and Freedom Forum founder Allen H. Neuharth was honored last night for lifetime achievement, receiving the Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award from the National Press Foundation.
In making the award, the judges said that "by founding USA TODAY and The Freedom Forum, Allen Neuharth has had a profound impact on both the reading habits of Americans and the professional development of journalists in the United States."
"The First Amendment guarantees a free press, but only free-spirited journalists can make that free press work," Neuharth said on receiving his award. "So I salute all free-spirit practitioners of the press … . They are all winners in my book."
Also at its 17th annual dinner, NPF honored Judy Woodruff, anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, with the 1999 Sol Taishoff Award for Broadcaster of the Year. The press foundation's selection committee said Woodruff "has distinguished herself as a fair and objective journalist and has demonstrated a breadth of knowledge and interest that serves her viewers well." She is a veteran of more than 20 years in broadcast journalism and is a Newseum trustee.
Woodruff praised the high standards of television journalism today, but also said that at times values had been obscured and standards lowered. "There is something precious about old-fashioned journalistic values: fairness, an insatiable desire to get the facts and truth, and a general agnosticism on outcomes," Woodruff said. "It's essential for editorial writers, columnists and commentators to have a point of view, even an edge. But that's not what good, fair reporters should bring to the table."
Other honorees at the dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel included:
Jim Willse, editor of The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J., winner of the George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award.
Mike Thompson, editorial cartoonist of the Detroit Free Press, winner of the Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Cartoonist of the Year Award.
Linda Douglass of ABC News and Alison Mitchell of The New York Times were awarded 1999 Everett McKinley Dirksen Awards for Congressional Reporting.
Neuharth began his career as a reporter on a small newspaper in his native South Dakota. After rising through the reporting, editing, and management ranks of newspapers in Florida, Michigan, and New York, he became Gannett president and chief operating officer in 1970, president and chief executive in 1973, and added the title of chairman in 1979.
He built Gannett Newspapers into the nation's largest newspaper company and started USA TODAY, the nation's most widely read newspaper. In 1991 he founded The Freedom Forum, of which he is a senior advisory trustee.
