Eight to Receive the 2010 Missouri Honor Medal

Columbia, Mo. (Sept. 15, 2010) — The 2010 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism will be presented to five leading journalists and an advertising executive, as well as two international organizations dedicated to press freedom.

The Missouri School of Journalism has awarded the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism annually since 1930. Approximately 450 distinguished journalists, advertising and public relations practitioners, business people, institutions and media organizations have been received this prestigious award.

The Missouri Honor Medal activities will be held Thursday, Oct. 28. Each medalist will present a master class to students during the day. The medals will be presented during a banquet that evening.

The 2010 recipients are:

2010 Missouri Honor Medal Winners


James Balog
James Balog

James Balog
Founder and Director
Extreme Ice Survey and Earth Vision Trust

For nearly 30 years James Balog has transcended the traditional conventions of nature photography. As founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), Balog is taking a monumental look at the impact climate change is having on the world’s glacial landscapes. Shocked by the changes he saw while shooting a June 2007 National Geographic cover story, “The Big Melt,” Balog initiated the most wide-ranging ground-based photographic study ever conducted using innovative time-lapse, video and conventional photography. EIS now documents melting glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, Nepal, Bolivia, the Alps and the northern U.S. Rockies. His seventh book, “Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report,” was published in March 2009.

Balog has been awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Aspen Institute’s Visual Arts & Design Award, the International League of Conservation Photographers League Award and the North American Nature Photography Association’s “Outstanding Photographer of the Year.”

Balog’s multimedia presentations have been featured around the globe, including on Capitol Hill, the “COP-15” United Nations Climate Change Conference, TEDGlobal, European Union Environmental Ministers meeting, the Explorers Club, the Aspen Institute’s Environment Forum and National Geographic symposia. The Extreme Ice Survey has received extensive media coverage on NBC, CBS and CNN programming, an NPR “Fresh Air” interview and an hour-long NOVA special on PBS.

In 2010, Balog founded the Earth Vision Trust with the mission of using powerful images and compelling ideas to improve human understanding of the environment and inspire positive personal and social action.

In recognition of three decades of using the photographic image to help the public understand the impact of environmental change.

Cathleen Black
Cathleen Black

Cathleen Black
Chairman, Hearst Magazines

Cathleen Black, considered “The First Lady of American Magazines” and “one of the leading figures in American publishing over the past two decades” by the Financial Times, is chairman of Hearst Magazines, a division of Hearst Corporation and one of the world’s largest publishers of monthly magazines. For more than 15 years, first as president and now as chairman, Black has managed the financial performance and development of 14 of the industry’s best-known titles, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, O: The Oprah Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Redbook and Town & Country. She also oversees nearly 200 international editions of those magazines in more than 100 countries.

Having begun her career in advertising sales, Black made publishing history in 1979 when she became the first woman publisher of the weekly consumer magazine New York. She is widely credited for the success of USA Today, where for eight years starting in 1983, she was first president, then publisher, as well as a board member and executive vice president/marketing of Gannett, its parent company. In 1991 she became president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, the industry’s largest trade group, where she served for five years before joining Hearst.

Black is the author of the best seller “BASIC BLACK: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” She serves as a member of numerous boards, including IBM and The Coca-Cola Company. She is an “all-star” on Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” list and has been included on Forbes magazine’s list of “The 100 Most Powerful Women” and Crain’s list of New York City’s “100 Most Influential Women in Business.”

In recognition of her tireless and creative leadership in the news and magazine industries.

The FLiP
The FLiP

Foundation for the Freedom of the Press (FLiP)
Bogotá, Colombia

The Foundation for the Freedom of the Press was created in the mid ’90s by a group of journalists who were worried about an average of seven colleagues being killed per year. They decided to join efforts to fight the violence, the impunity on those killings and other threats against the freedom of expression in Colombia. The FLiP started with the idea to make a Colombian version of a survival kit for journalists, an effort spearheaded by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez.

The FLiP established a network to document attacks against journalists and the news media. It works on self-protection and freedom of expression fundamentals. The FLiP creates manuals and hosts workshops to teach journalists what they have to do to possible perpetrators, who could include the police and local authorities, and what not to do. The FLiP promotes victims’ rights with the Colombian government program that now protects its 84 journalists.

The FLiP lobbies at the General Attorney Office for a team of attorneys to investigate attacks against journalists and to bridge victims’ and prosecutors’ investigations, looking for help to solve a few of the 67 cases the FLiP follows.

Today the FLiP has a network of 30 journalists in Colombia and runs four programs to move against impunity and all forms of censorship. It documents the cases for the government protection program and investigates, as well as promotes, the public’s interest in gaining access to information at government offices. The FLiP promotes transparency and equity in government advertising and educates journalists on how to defend themselves, gain access to information and improve their practices. It also advises journalists in cases of judiciary harassment.

The Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa and its staff and members, who risk their lives daily in the fierce pursuit of truth on behalf of the citizens of Colombia.

Dorothy J. Gaiter
Dorothy J. Gaiter

Dorothy J. Gaiter
Wine Columnist and Author

Dorothy J. Gaiter, BJ ’73, retired recently from The Wall Street Journal, where she wrote the popular Tastings wine column with her husband. While a student at the School, Gaiter served as one of the founding editors of Blackout, a newspaper published by the University of Missouri’s African-American students, and wrote for The Savitar, the MU yearbook. Following graduation, Gaiter worked as a reporter at the Miami Herald and an editor at the Miami News before joining The New York Times as a reporter for the Week in Review section, the metro desk and the style section. In 1984, Gaiter returned to the Miami Herald, where she became the paper’s first African-American female editorial writer and regular op-ed columnist.

In 1990, Gaiter became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York City, and by 1996 she had become the Journal’s national news editor in charge of race and urban affairs coverage. Her writing on race was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and she won awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the National Association of Black Journalists.

In 1998, when the Journal launched its Weekend Edition, Gaiter and her husband, John Brecher, the Journal’s Page One editor, added the wine column to their regular duties. They became full-time wine columnists in 2000. Together, they’ve published four books, including “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine: New and Improved,” “Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion: Red, White and Bubbly to Celebrate the Joy of Living” and “Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes From a Marriage.” The Journal nominated Tastings for a Pulitzer Prize. The pair retired at the end of 2009.

In recognition of a career devoted to helping people understand the challenges, complexities and pleasures of the human condition.

Myron Kandel
Myron Kandel

Myron Kandel
Financial Journalist

Myron Kandel pioneered financial news on television, serving as CNN’s founding financial editor and economic commentator for 25 years. In 2000, TJFR, a media industry publication, named him one of the 10 most influential financial journalists of the 20th century. He previously served as the financial editor of the Washington Star, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post. Kandel also was a reporter for The New York Times, a foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune, a syndicated newspaper columnist and the editor of the New York Law Journal.

Kandel started his journalism career as a copy boy at The New York Times, working nights while completing his senior year at Brooklyn College and earning a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has taught journalism at Columbia and the City College of New York.

Kandel has received lifetime achievement awards from the Loeb Foundation, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the New York Financial Writers’ Association. He also served as president of both SABEW and the New York Financial Writers. His 1982 book, “How to Cash In on the Coming Stock Market Boom,” accurately forecasted the biggest bull market in American history, which began later that year. From 2005 to 2008, Kandel headed the New Hampshire-based Initiative for Corporate Responsibility and Investor Protection.

In recognition of his vision and hard work in helping citizens understand the world of business.

Larry Postaer
Larry Postaer

Larry Postaer
Co-Chairman
Rubin Postaer & Associates

Retail. Mail order. Small agency. Large agency. Own agency. – The impressive career of Larry Postaer, BJ ’59, has spanned all of these in his 50 years on the creative side of the advertising business.

He began writing newspaper inserts for a now-defunct department store in Chicago earning $65 a week and soon moved on to be one of 80 copywriters for the former Sears catalog. His coveted assignment? Writing the back-cover announcement of an amazing product—the first-ever Silvertone color television.

Two years and dozens of applications later, Postaer got a copywriting job with a small Chicago advertising agency, Stern Walters & Simmons. The owners promoted him, at the age of 24, to creative director. Fourteen years later Postaer joined a major agency, Needham Harper & Steers, as vice president and group creative director. His group’s client list included McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, State Farm, Campbell, Wrigley, Dial and General Mills’ Hamburger Helper.

Five years into that job, Needham Harper & Steers transferred Postaer to its Los Angeles office to oversee a small but promising car company called Honda. Eventually Postaer and his business-side partner Gerry Rubin bought out the agency’s L.A. office while retaining the Honda account, a move made possible because of the largest merger in advertising history (Omnicom). Today Postaer is the co-chairman of RPA (Rubin Postaer & Associates), one of the largest independent ad agencies in the country.

In recognition of 50 years of using the powers of creative and ethical advertising to support a vigorous free market.

Sandy Rowe
Sandy Rowe

Sandy Rowe
Editor

Sandy Rowe was the award-winning editor of The Oregonian in Portland from 1993 to January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes, including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Currently Rowe is the 2010-2011 Knight Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University.

The National Press Foundation named Rowe the Editor of the Year in 2003. In 2008, Editor & Publisher magazine named her Editor of the Year. In 2010, the American Society of Newspaper Editors awarded Rowe its National Leadership Award.

Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. She is a member of Willamette University’s Board of Trustees and of the Medill School of Journalism’s Board of Visitors at Northwestern University.

Rowe served on the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1994 to 2003 and was its chair in 2002-2003. She is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

From l984 until April l993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va. She had been with The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star for 22 years. The Virginian-Pilot won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting, its first in 25 years, under her leadership.

She is married to Gerard P. Rowe, a lawyer, and is the mother of two daughters, Mims and Sarah.

In recognition of her international leadership in journalism and inspiring newsrooms to provide news that informs and leads communities.

ZETA Weekly
ZETA Weekly

ZETA Weekly Newspaper
Tijuana, Baja California

ZETA Weekly Newspaper is the most credible and solid journalism institution in the northwestern region of Mexico. It holds a strong influence over the social, economic and political scene throughout the five counties in Baja California as well as other Mexican cities.

Founded April 11, 1980, in Tijuana, ZETA Weekly Newspaper stressed the ideals of freedom and independence of the press at a time when official statements and policies ruled and politicians were used to being praised by journalists. It also introduced the use of surveys as a journalism tool and exclusive interviews with the oppressed political opposition.

ZETA Weekly Newspaper is the only newspaper in Mexico that gives considerable space to the opinions of its readers and a group of external collaborators, who represent all sectors of society – political, religious, financial, activists, non-government and government agencies. ZETA Weekly Newspaper also is the only weekly newspaper in the history of the Mexican written press to offer a signed editorial.

ZETA Weekly Newspaper has maintained Tijuana as its grounds of operation. The growth rate of this border town and the way it influences the rest of the country and the area south of the United States is significant. The understanding of both countries regarding political, financial and social contributions is defined on a daily basis.

Identified by groups all over the world, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom Forum, as an example of independent reporting and publishing and a form of freedom of expression and ideas, ZETA Weekly Newspaper operates with a financial structure independent of government and political pressures, making it possible to maintain an objective and professional editorial policy.

In recognition of the editors and staff of ZETA Weekly Newspaper and the hundreds of their colleagues who risk their lives daily in the fierce pursuit of truth on behalf of the citizens of Mexico.

Updated: May 13, 2020

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