(Earlier: "Party Photos: National Press Foundation Dinner")

Some more notes from Thursday's National Press Foundation Dinner (full list of winners and honorees here):

-"Despite buyouts and layoffs, we need to keep doing our jobs, honestly and aggressively, now more than ever." WSJ's John Wilke (winner of one of the Everett McKinley Dirksen Awards for Distinguished Reporting of Congress)

-1250 people in the audience (most ever)

-They raised $800,000, $100,000 over last year.

-WSJ's Jerry Seib paid tribute to ABC's John McWethy in his remarks.

-In his remarks, the Houston Chronicle's Jeff Cohen (recipient of The Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award) urged attendees to "keep fighting" for a federal shield law.

-The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who along with Anne Hull, won the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, said that "things have not been fixed as much as they should have" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "There's so much work to be done."

-Mocking his age, the NYT's Thomas Friedman (who took home the W. M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award) quoted from Pete Seeger's "My Get Up And Go Has Got Up And Went" during his remarks.

I get up each morning and dust off my wits

Open the paper and read the obits

If I'm not there, I know I'm not dead

So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed

Friedman assured the audience that he's "only been on book leave for four months...I'll be back...."

He also put a positive spin on the doom-and-gloom scenarios being realized in newsrooms everywhere. "More people are engaged in journalism than ever before...I intend to stick around to see how this story ends."

Friedman thanked his wife, Ann, and his "other family, my New York Times family," saying "without these two families I would have had a lifetime with a lot less achievement."