An Emotion-Filled Night At The Watergate
The relatively intimate gathering last night at the Watergate to celebrate the second annual Mike Kelly Award was emotional for audience members and recipients alike.
The well-fed cocktail reception in the Atlantic’s 8th floor Watergate suite was followed by a dinner in an adjoining room, where some of the city’s elite journalists gathered to pay tribute not just to the award’s recipient and the four finalists but also to pay homage to Kelly, the friendly, dynamic, and witty editor of the Atlantic, author, and columnist, killed in 2003 covering the Iraq War.
The tribute to Kelly was clear in the audience of about 150, including members of the Kelly family and former coworkers and friends. As Atlantic chair David G. Bradley said, the award–at least for a while–is unique among major awards for the recipients are welcomed into the “Mike Kelly Clan.” While there are no first generation Pulitzers or Nobels still living, Kelly’s best friends still carry his flame forward.
The dinner attracted a wide spectrum of media types, including the NYT’s Adam Nagourney, CNN’s Bob Franken, CBS’ Bill Plante, ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Ann Compton, NPR’s Diane Rehm, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, and Washingtonian’s Jack Limpert, among many others, as well as Atlantic Media staffers like Charles Green, Carl Cannon, Alexis Simendinger, Jonathan Rauch, and Bill Powers of National Journal, as well as outgoing Atlantic editor Cullen Murphy, and head honchos Bradley and John Fox Sullivan.
After food and music, Cullen Murphy and Charles Green introduced the evening and explained that the 72 entries for this year’s award should give heart to those who question the state of American journalism.
More after the jump.
Finalist David Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker and former editor of The Hill, missed the awards ceremony because his shuttle was stuck in La Guardia by the early evening thunderstorms. Grann’s wife accepted in his sted, saying he was deeply honored because Kelly had been an early mentor to him.
Similiarly, finalist Kim Murphy, the LAT’s Moscow bureau chief, couldn’t attend and so the paper’s Tyler Marshall accepted, explaining how Murphy had repeatedly had to play follow-up to Kelly’s reporting during the first Gulf War.
After listening to the tributes to Kelly, finalist Maximillian Potter of Denver’s 5280 magazine, who was recognized for three articles which in the judges’ words were “beautifully written, ambitious in intent, and–most of all–fearless in their pursuit of truth”–said he felt unworthy of the award.
The fourth finalist, the NYT Magazine’s Elizabeth Rubin was recognized for her reporting on Iraq and Saudi Arabia: “Readers come away from her stories with a much richer sense of two cultures that Americans ignore at their own peril.”
The Mike Kelly Award itself, which includes a $25,000 prize–one of the richest awards in journalism–was presented to the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof for his reporting on the genocide in Sudan and the sexual exploitation of young women in Cambodia. The citation concluded, “With conviction, passion, and audacity, Kristof tugged at the world’s conscience, in the best tradition of Michael Kelly.”
Kristof’s brief remarks focused on the challenge facing American journalism in a world where, as he put it “when much of the country knows about the runaway bride and yet few know about Darfur.”
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Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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