A Letter from the Publisher

Ah spring, season of hope, young love, baseball and journalism awards. Each year more than half of all national prizes for editorial and photographic excellence are presented in April, May and June. At the midpoint of this awards season, TIME has already captured a wallful of major honors. Last week the prestigious Overseas Press Club of America added three more. Correspondents Walter Isaacson and Donald Neff were given the O.P.C.'s Mary Hemingway Award for best magazine reporting from abroad, for their work on last year's cover story "The Colombian Connection: Billions in Pot and Coke." Neff interviewed drug enforcement officials in New York, Miami and Bogota, and surveyed by small plane the clandestine airstrips and marijuana plantations of Colombia's remote Guajira province. "We got shot at when we flew too low," says Neff. "They probably thought we were hijackers after their crop." Isaacson, who wrote the story, haunted seedy cafes in New York City's Jackson Heights to talk with distributors at the other end of the "Colombian connection."

Iranian Photographer Kaveh Golestan, who has risked his life and freedom to cover Iran's revolution for TIME, received the O.P.C.'s Robert Capa Gold Medal. The award for best photo reporting from abroad went to David Burnett for pictures taken mostly on assignment for TIME. Burnett was also named Magazine Photographer of the Year in the University of Missouri/National Press Photographers Association competition and won the organizations' newsmagazine first prize for his photo of a Cambodian refugee mother and child. (The same photo was chosen Press Photo of the Year in the 23rd World Press Photo Contest.)

Other organizations honoring TIME journalists include Georgetown University, which awarded the Edward Weintal Prize for distinguished reporting on U.S. diplomacy to Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott. The National Intelligence Study Center cited Associate Editor Edwin Warner for his Essay "Strengthening the CIA." The Atomic Industrial Forum honored Senior Writer George Church for his Essay "Looking Anew at the Nuclear Future." The White House News Photographers Association awarded its Presidential Class first prize to Dennis Brack's photo for TIME of the Carters visiting Japan. And spring is only half over.

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