Photo: David Levene for the Guardian

Winning stuff is always a nice thing.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has been selected by the Harvard Kennedy School to receive the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Rusbridger, who has been editor of the Guardian since 1995, is being recognized for his leadership in the paper’s five-year investigation and exposure of phone hacking by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He led the negotiations with Julian Assange and subsequent publication of WikiLeaks documents. Rusbridger has also been instrumental in the paper’s “digital-first” business strategy.

Rusbridger will accept his award and deliver a speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on March 6.

Past recipients of the Goldsmith Career Award include Frank Rich, Seymour Hersh, Christiane Amanpour, Peter Jennings, Gwen Ifill, David Fanning and Daniel Schorr. The awards also include a major prize for investigative reporting and two book prizes.

We’re not quite sure how much of an audience there is for e-books, but The New Yorker is certainly grabbing some attention with its first venture into the territory. The Cutline reports that the magazine’s first e-book — titled After 9/11 — will center on 9/11, and features writing that will make it attractive to readers:

[The book] includes vignettes from the magazine’s trademark ‘Talk of the Town’ section by Hendrik Hertzberg, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, Calvin Trillin and George Packer; deeply reported features by Adam Gopnik, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Jon Lee Anderson and Steve Coll; criticism by Malcolm Gladwell; and fiction by Don DeLillo. It also includes Nicholas Schmidle‘s recent account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The New Yorker’s Deputy Editor, Pam McCarthy, said that if the book is successful, the magazine will look to do more.

After 9/11 is available for $7.99 on the Kindle or Nook.

Was Scott Horton‘s “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’” article, surprise winner of the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting, just another empty conspiracy theory?

The premise of the article was that three detainees who reportedly hanged themselves in Guantanamo had actually been killed during a torture session, and President Obama’s administration at minimum failed to fully investigate this because of what a public relations nightmare it would have been. But Alex Koppelman at Adweek argues that the theory doesn’t hold up.

Koppelman says that the story was shopped around to many investigative journalists, including The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski. Several devoted months to investigating the story, but ultimately set it aside after deeming it not credible.  “Only after the big guys passed was the story shopped to Horton,” writes Koppelman. “He won for reporting, but in fact the story fell right into his lap, factual flaws and all.”

What made other journalists pass on the story? For one, Horton’s main sources “were perimeter guards, distant from the prisoners.” When they compared their accounts with “official reports of the suicide… it didn’t match up.”  Moreover, Horton’s story left out a few key details, including the fact that one of the independent autopsies of the prisoners “ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death.” And another questionable point is the fact that the story’s source, who reportedly saw the detainees carted off in a white van, had “no way of knowing whether the men he saw were the ones who died later that night.”

The Harper‘s story has met with controversy from the beginning, though the National Magazine Awards stands by its choice.

The International Center for Journalists announced today that investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker will be awarded the group’s prestigious Founders Award later this year.

Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his story exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, will pick up his prize at the ICFJ’s 25th anniversary awards dinner on Nov. 12 in Washington, D.C., hosted by George Stephanopoulos.

International reporters Cao Junwu of China and Chouchou Namegabe Nabintu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will also be honored at the November dinner with 2009 Knight International Journalism Awards. The organization said Cao, a reporter for Southern Weekend will be recognized for his work covering last year’s Sichuan earthquake and the Shandong flood in 2007. Radio journalist Namegabe is being honored for her work reporting on sexual violence against women.

“Our winners this year are fearless truth-tellers who won’t back down from a tough story, no matter the risks,” said ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan. “These journalists tell important stories that others have shied away from.”

A full release about the Knight International Journalism Award winners after the jump

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A line slipped in near the end of Mike Allen‘s Politico article about the media coverage of Barack Obama‘s overseas trip, is making some waves. Per Allen: “Among those for whom there was no room was Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent of The New Yorker. The campaign, which was furious about the magazine’s satirical cover this week, cited space constraints in turning him away.” (Hmm, sort of like the time John McCain neglected to invite the NYT to his health records viewing party.) Over at Eat the Press Rachel Sklar says the decision “sends a clear — and worrisome — signal from the Obama campaign: If we don’t like it, man, will you know it.” A decision, she points out, which merely reinforces a quote made in Lizza’s (amazingly researched, though not terribly flattering) article : “[Obama] earned a reputation that “‘you’re not going to punk me, you’re not going to roll me over, you’re not going to jam me.’”

It should be noted The New Yorker was not the only one cut out of the “Trip of the Century”; 200 people applied and only 40 were allocated spots. That said, The New Yorker is hardly your average magazine. As Gawker’s Ryan Tate points out,

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