The Winners   

BEST NEWSPAPER EDITOR
Geneva Overholser
Not for a minute does Geneva Overholser lose sight of the fact that as a woman editor she's a rarity, and she admits playing it for everything it's worth. "It's really a gift," she says. "I'm more of an outsider. If you are already the odd woman out, it's easier for you to hear more diverse voices. I'm also proud to be able to be in a position where young women can look and say, 'Why not me?' "

Since Overholser, 44, became editor of the Des Moines Register in 1988, her paper has won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about a rape victim that stemmed from a column she had written on the issue. For her, the paper's greatest achievement last year was a major redesign and the addition of nine more pages of local news each week "in an economy where not many people are making advances."

A graduate of Wellesley College with a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Overholser has had an exemplary career. When offered the job as editor of the Des Moines Register, she was a member of the editorial board of the New York Times specializing in foreign affairs and national security. "It was the greatest dilemma of my life. I loved my job." For advice she turned to the late Howard Simons, then curator for the Nieman Foundation, where she had been a fellow in 1985. Overholser says Simons told her, "If you don't take it you are not nearly as smart as I thought you were."

Overholser says she realized that she had "never seen myself as an editor, never even thought of it. How many women would have thought of it? I could not adequately appreciate what a wonderful, wonderful job it could be."

BEST FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Francis X. Clines
Francis "Frank" Clines, 54, was appointed New York Times Moscow bureau chief in January 1991. Then all hell broke loose. "It was like when a lottery ticket hits," he says. "You've been buying tickets all your life and then, bing!"

Even now, Clines says, he can hardly believe it happened – the failed coup, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the departure of Mikhail Gorbachev. "There were so many warnings of the coup. The Russians are very melodramatic and it was hard to believe in the possibility even though there was a terrible tension in this place. It was like it was Chicken Little time."

Like his colleagues covering the Soviet Union, he took to the streets. "For the rest of the wacky day you could run around the city and watch their attempts to step back 20 years and have a terrorist event. The sense those coup leaders exuded was of Bozos. The people weren't buying it and they were pissed off and you could just see the coup wasn't working. I love to think about it and laugh."

Clines revels in his job as a foreign correspondent, a role he's had for the last six of the 34 years he's been with the Times. (He has also worked out of Jerusalem and London.) Starting as a copy boy at the paper, he soon was covering local news. Then, for several years, his prose was showcased in the "About New York" column.

Clines much prefers reporting from abroad to the life of a Washington correspondent, which he was from 1979 to 1986. "Politics are microwaved in D.C.," he says. "They're over in a minute. Although I was lucky--I got to cover Reagan. He was like Paul Bunyan. He didn't know who he was or his own power but he had incredible self-confidence."

Clines has a wife and four children, all of whom live in the United States. "There's no time for a personal life here," he says. "You just get lost in endless work."

BEST CRITIC OF THE NEWS MEDIA
Jeff Greenfield
Jeff Greenfield says he's bowled over to be getting a Best in the Business award. "The last thing I won was hall patrol monitor at P.S. 165," he jokes.
The ABC political and media analyst has emerged as one of his network's most distinctive voices. A regular correspondent on "ABC News Nightline" (for which he has won an Emmy), Greenfield, who has been with the network since 1983, also appears on "World News Tonight."
A graduate of Yale Law School, the 48-year-old reporter built much of his reputation as a media critic when he worked for CBS during the 1980 conventions. Although he still wears two hats, he says, "There's more political stuff here. In the past 15 years, media evaluation has folded more into politics."

He says he was appalled by public reaction to the media coverage of Anita Hill, which he believes Congress could have kept more private. "People blame the media for polluting the airways."

Not that the media are so pristine, Greenfield says. "There's still plenty to blame. If there weren't, I'd be out of a job." Greenfield also scores the media for its coverage of the William Kennedy Smith trial. "They were pandering to the hunger for titillating material about a very famous family. Anyone who claims the trial was about the workings of the criminal justice system is a hypocrite."

A print journalist as well, Greenfield has written nine books and does a twice-weekly political column that appears in 160 newspapers.
Looking back over 25 years, Greenfield finds "the media have become much more adversarial. I do think there is a lack of perspective when the media goes headlong after some stories. It's like a giant tank rolling downhill. However much the First Amendment says we can do that, the question, 'Should we do that?' is not asked nearly enough."

BEST EDITORIAL PAGE
The New York Times
"You could argue that the job of editorial writers is to go down to the beach every morning and forage and collect and sort the shells, put all the pink ones together and the white ones together and tell our readers what today's news means," says Jack Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times. "But if we did only that, we would be a soulless kind of business. There is a certain joy in being adept in responding to complicated events."
The "real fun," Rosenthal says, is writing editorials about causes. "We like each member of our editorial board to have some issue they burn for. Something that unless they set out to do it, nobody will do it."

Only half the people on the Times' 16-member board are journalists; the other half are specialists. Michael Weinstein, who came on three years ago, had been head of the economics department at Haverford College. The Times sent him abroad last year, says Rosenthal, to "help our readers understand the immensity of the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in adopting capitalism." Another specialist on the board, Lee Sigal, had been a professor of international relations at Wesleyan College. John MacKenzie, a former Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Post, also once taught law at Columbia University.

"The theory is that it is easier to bring style to knowledge than vice versa," says Rosenthal, 53, who has been editing the page for the past six years. "There is no substitute for knowing your subject."

Editorial board meetings, he says, are sometimes raucous. "Sometimes we argue like fury. Sometimes we bore each other to death."

MOST EXCITING MAGAZINE
Vanity Fair
What keeps Vanity Fair exciting month after month, so compelling that many of its 991,000 readers devour it from cover to cover? "We're constantly bringing aboard new blood, new talent," says Editor in Chief Tina Brown. "We try to keep the magazine surprising intellectually and visually."
Visually, Vanity Fair is a feast. The design is crisp and the photographs are frequently sensational. Brown says that Annie Leibovitz's shot of a nude, very pregnant Demi Moore had to have been "the hottest" cover of the year.

Brown, 38, characterizes her magazine as "an extra-dimensional news magazine. We expand the story behind the story." Thus she serves up Brian Masters' uncomfortably close look at Jeffrey Dahmer, who allegedly murdered and dismembered boys, and a feature by Leslie Bennets uncovering the cover-up of pedophilia in the priesthood. Brown boasts that Vanity Fair beat out the network magazine shows with Marie Brenner's disturbing story of a deranged woman who stalked an eminent surgeon for eight years.

Many Vanity Fair contributors write about people they've known, such as Kathleen Tynan's recent feature on the late director Tony Richardson, which is larded with examples of their personal encounters over the years, or a piece by Brenner on the late diplomat-socialite Marietta Tree. "Many people will show nothing except a routine, humdrum face to a journalist they do not know," says Brown. "But in some stories, to have seen that character in action brings a certain intimacy that can resonate and bring a patina to a story."

Finally, Brown believes in leaving her writers alone. "They are not tampered with," she says. "We strive to project the writers' style in their own reality and not have them conform to some sort of Vanity Fair style that's not comfortable for them."

BEST CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINE
National Review
National Review Editor John O'Sullivan is amused that the New Republic came in a close second to his magazine in WJR's "best conservative magazine" category. But he's not surprised. "I can quite see they have half a foot in our camp – [or] a foot in both graves."

O'Sullivan, 49, who worked for publications in the United States and in London and spent two years as Margaret Thatcher's domestic policy adviser, has been editor of National Review for four years. But only for the last year and a half has he been on his own. Previously he served under the magazine's founder, William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1990 resigned as editor in chief and retired the title. The erudite Buckley, who had run the magazine since 1955, continues to write for it and his influence is still very much intact.

Succeeding Buckley was "intimidating," O'Sullivan says. "But one tries not to think about it."

The magazine is not about to veer off in any other direction with its new editor. "We were a conservative magazine from the word go and we still are. We are the ideal forum for all conservative views, neo-con, libertarian. We've always taken that view. We describe ourselves simply as conservatives."
O'Sullivan says that while his views are "fairly close to Bill's," he knows different people, has brought in some new writers and has established an "On the Scene" section for analytical reports from Washington and other parts of the country.

National Review reaches about 150,000 readers--"an important audience as well as a large one," O'Sullivan says. "It is one of the touchstones of American journalism."

BEST LIBERAL MAGAZINE
The New Republic
I'm extremely offended that National Review beat us in the conservative category," Andrew Sullivan, the New Republic's new, 28-year-old, British-born editor says with a laugh. But he's not joking. "I don't think we are a conservative magazine, but I think we have a much better conservative content."
There's no question that the once fiery liberal magazine has a decidedly different tone these days. Hendrik Hertzberg, 48, Sullivan's predecessor and now a senior editor, says that in the past 15 years the magazine "has taken on a view more critical of received liberal truths, though it also remains critical of conservative orthodoxy. If there is such a thing as organized liberalism, the New Republic no longer sees itself as its voice, rather as an independent critic of all parts of the political spectrum."

The magazine's drift away from the left is due, in part, to the varied political beliefs held by its major writers. For example, Michael Kinsley "is a liberal but one with a very independent and non-orthodox bent of mind," says Hertzberg. "Morton Kondracke, who joined the magazine with a liberal bent, has evolved into a reporter with a conservative bent. Fred Barnes joined as a conservative, while Charles Krauthammer, who had been a Walter Mondale speechwriter, has developed more into a standard neo-con."
As for the guy who owns the store, TNR Editor in Chief and Chairman Martin Peretz, Hertzberg characterizes his views as "a mixture of neo-conservative and liberal."

Whatever it means, it's working. Peretz says TNR, which has a circulation of 100,000, did so well in both the liberal and conservative magazine categories because "we are truly in the post-ideological age... The New Republic understands that. That's why readers across the spectrum think we're best in polar opposites."

BEST EVENING NEWS ANCHOR
Peter Jennings
"I did a terrible job last night," laments ABC "World News Tonight" anchor and Senior Editor Peter Jennings. "I wasn't concentrating. You have to really concentrate when you're on the air. When you've anchored for quite awhile, you may be guilty of coasting some nights. When you coast on television, pretty soon you drive off a cliff."

If Jennings was "coasting" on the night in question, then he was the only one who knew it. A man of exacting standards, he explains, "I'm fairly tough on others, so if I'm hard on myself, it takes the edge off a little. The audience deserves the best we can do. When I can't do my best it upsets me twice as much."

This prodigious lack of complacency may go a long way in explaining why ABC "World News Tonight" has outdistanced its rivals in ratings for the past two years. Jennings attributes the show's achievements to other factors. Among them is "American Agenda," which premiered in November 1988, a relatively long segment in which a pressing social issue, such as health care, is examined in depth. He also cites "tight editing" by himself, Executive Producer Paul Friedman, whom he calls "the best in the business," and others.

When Jennings, 53, became sole anchor in 1983, he brought with him more than 28 years of domestic and foreign reporting experience, a great deal of it in the Middle East. That track record has proved invaluable.

What troubles Jennings is how the next generation of reporters is going to get the experience he did. "I used to be able to take three days to go up the Nile in order to get a feel for Sadat's Egypt. Now reporters are expected to land in Cairo and be on television immediately. And you cannot cover America by dropping in reporters from New York."

BEST MORNING NEWS ANCHOR
Katherine Couric
These days, almost everyone--including the Nielsen ratings – agrees that after more than a year on death row, NBC's "Today" show seems to be pink-cheeked again. And you don't have to look far for the reason. It's Katie Couric.

Couric, 35, has captivated viewers since she joined Bryant Gumbel last April as co-host in the wake of the Jane Pauley-Deborah Norville debacle that nearly torpedoed the show.

Among Couric's achievements: She captured the first post-gulf war interview with Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, snared one of only two pre-Clarence Thomas hearings interviews with Anita Hill, and apparently has tamed the imperious Gumbel.

"Getting along with Bryant has to be the fluke of the 20th century," she cracks, "or else it's a backlash against blonde anchors."
Couric came to "Today" with a solid news background. At NBC since 1989, she's been a national and a Pentagon correspondent. The latter assignment was a big help in getting Schwarzkopf, she says. Before NBC, Couric was a desk assistant at ABC, a producer and political correspondent for CNN, and a reporter for stations in Miami and Washington, D.C.

How does Couric explain her coups? "You have to be a pit bull," she says. "You can't stop pursuing it." Case in point: After hearing that Anita Hill was "smart, poised and not a wacko," Couric was determined to interview her. "I made about 40 calls to the University of Oklahoma law school. Miraculously, I got through to her." In a format that calls for a lot of fluff, tough issues are important to Couric, who was also responsible for a "Today" segment on sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. "I wanted to show how out-of-touch and hypocritical those guys [in Congress] are."

BEST FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, TV
Peter Arnett
Over the past 30 years, Peter Arnett has covered 17 conflicts and won a 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, but it took the Persian Gulf War to make him famous. He gets quite a kick out of that. Variously dubbed "Baghdad Pete" and "The Baghdad Bandit" for holding the fort for CNN in enemy territory, Arnett, 57, is regarded by many as the consummate war correspondent.