Cooler Than An Oscar

By James Kelly, Managing Editor

One fine spring day every year, hundreds of journalists trek to New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for the National Magazine Awards. The award is the highest honor a magazine can win, and the judges must sift through hundreds of submissions to find 17 winners. That may sound like a lot, but remember, there were some three dozen Oscars handed out this year. And the NMA stabile, in my biased opinion, looks cooler: instead of a naked man holding a sword, the victors receive an Ellie, a replica of an elephant designed by Alexander Calder.

This year's ceremony, which took place last week, made for an especially fine spring day: we won an Ellie in Public Interest for our three-part series last year on campaign finance, written by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. As the judges' citation put it, "In an election year that saw much heated rhetoric on campaign finance reform, this concisely written series stands as a devastating indictment of a system run amok. By ferreting out individual stories of who gets hurt and why, the authors bring the issue of big-money political lobbying into ultra-sharp focus."

This is the second Ellie for Jim and Don; two years ago, we won for their four-part series on corporate welfare. As TIME readers know, these two men not only have a knack for making sense of big, sprawling subjects, but they also always manage to find the connection between policy decisions and how they affect folks like you and me. Before they came to TIME in 1997, Jim and Don won two Pulitzer Prizes for their work at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which makes them the only journalists to win the highest awards in newspaper reporting and magazine writing twice. You would think this would make them arrogant (hard as it may be to believe that a journalist could be arrogant), but they are models of self-effacement. My only quibble with them is that they collect so many statues and plaques (just two weeks ago, they won the Sigma Delta Chi award for magazine investigative reporting for their campaign-finance stories) that I'm spending too much time going to luncheons in their honor. An editor should have such problems...

James Kelly, Managing Editor