Tina Brown, the editor of both Newsweek and The Daily Beast, was the guest speaker at The Deadline Club Annual Awards Dinner in 2011. She was the subject of a lively interview with Keith Kelly, the Media Ink columnist of The New York Post. This was the first year that the club hosted a Q&A with a newsmaker rather than holding a keynote speech, and the audience was enthusiastic about the new format.
More than 200 journalists packed the Empire Room at the Waldorf=Astoria on Park Avenue. Newsweek had only recently purchased the Daily Beast and installed Brown in the editor’s seat of the venerable newsweekly magazine. Sydney Harman, the audio magnate who had purchased Newsweek, had recently died. He had been on the agenda to introduce Brown. His widow, Congresswoman Jane Harman, stepped in to make the introduction. Before Brown and Kelly took the stage, the event had already made news.
The conversation was followed by the presentation of the club’s coveted “Rubes.” These statuettes, designed by the late American artist Rube Goldberg, have been bequeathed to the club’s contest winners for decades. The contest was among the more competitive in recent years, with around 300 entries. Writers, photographers and producers were recognized from all forms of media, including print, broadcast and digital media.
The Deadline Club awarded three scholarships, each worth $2,000, to worthy journalism students in New York. The scholarship winners were invited to attend the club’s awards dinner as guests. They included Yasmin Ogale, an undergraduate at New York University, Marielena Groeger, a graduate student at New York University, and Hélène Francineau, a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Each year, the club also honors someone who has made outstanding contributions to journalism education in the greater New York metropolitan area. In 2011, that honor went to Edmund Sullivan, Executive Director of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and Professional Prizes at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Awards
The 2011 awards recognized work done in 2010.
The New York Times, the Associated Press and Sports Illustrated took home the most honors at the Deadline Club’s annual awards dinner Monday night, each receiving four awards for excellence in journalism during 2010.
The Times won two of the Deadline Club’s most prestigious awards: The Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting for “The War Logs/State Secrets” and The Public Service Award of Alan Schwarz’s continuing series on sports concussions.
The Associated Press won awards for spot news reporting and enterprise reporting, as well as in the categories of spot news photo and online multimedia, interactive graphics and animation.
Sports Illustrated won for magazine feature reporting and science reporting and took home awards in two photography categories: feature photo and sports photo.
Vanity Fair, The Forward and Time.com took home two awards each. In all, there were 18 media organizations represented, including The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Star-Ledger, and many more.
Read the list of 2011 winners.