The 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years: Nominees

Here is the list of nominees, plus write-ins, by the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University for our list of “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” These nominations were compiled and voted on in March 2012. The final list of 100 was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012.

These lists are intended to begin, not end, a conversation on what makes for outstanding journalism. Unity, for example, an organization of journalists of color, has released in response a “seed list” of accomplished journalists with diverse backgrounds.

– Mitchell Stephens, Professor of Journalism, NYU

Eddie Adams: an Associated Press photographer who took one of the iconic photos of the Vietnam War: of a Saigon execution.

James Agee: a journalist, critic, poet, screenwriter and novelist who wrote the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a celebration of depression-era sharecropper families.

Roger Ailes: founding president of Fox News Channel in 1996 and former president of CNBC, who also served as a top media consultant for a number of prominent Republican candidates.

Joseph Alsop: a journalist and then an influential columnist from the 1930s through the 1970s; created the political column Matter of Fact with his brother Stewart Alsop in 1946.

Christiane Amanpour: long-time and distinguished international reporter for CNN; now also works for ABC News.

Roger Angell: an essayist and journalist, known in particular for his lyrical, incisive New Yorker pieces about baseball.

John Lee Anderson: an author and investigative journalist, Anderson has spend much time reporting from war zones for organizations like the New York Times, the Nation and the New Yorker.

Hannah Arendt: a political thinker, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, who reported the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker; those articles were turned into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963.

Roone Arledge: the long-time president of ABC Sports and ABC News, Arledge launched Monday Night Football and helped turn ABC News from an also-ran in the 1970s into a leading news organization.

Peter Arnett: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the Vietnam and Gulf wars, and was one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden.

Russell Baker: a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and humorist who wrote the popular “Observer” column in the New York Times from 1962 to 1998.

James Baldwin: an essayist, journalist and novelist whose finely written essays, including “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My Name” and The Fire Next Time, made a significant contribution to the civil-rights movement.

Donald L. Barlett: an investigative journalist who, along with his colleague James B. Steele, won two Pulitzer Prizes and multiple other awards for his powerful investigative series from the 1970s through the 1990s at the Philadelphia Inquirer and later at Time magazine.

Claude A. Barnett: a Chicago Defender journalist who started the Associated Negro Press, a news service for black newspapers, in 1919.

Dan Barry: a skilled and graceful human-interest reporter, Barry wrote the “About New York” column for the New York Times for three years and now writes the paper’s “This Land” column.

Dave Barry: an author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who wrote a popular and widely syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005.

Joseph A. Barry: contributed his smart, vivid reports out of Paris from the 1950s through the 1980s, in books and for the New York Post, Newsweek and many other publications.

Meyer Berger: a fine columnist and feature writer for the New York Times, where he worked, except for a short stretch at the New Yorker, from 1928 to 1959; Berger won the Pulitzer Prize for his report on the murderer Howard Unruh.

Victor Berger: editor of the prominent German-language socialist newspaper the Milwaukee Leader from 1911 to 1929.

Carl Bernstein: while a young reporter at the Washington Post in the early 1970s broke the Watergate scandal along with Bob Woodward.

Homer Bigart: who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting for the Herald Tribune and then the New York Times, which he joined in 1955; he covered many of the major events of his time, from war to civil rights.

Wolf Blitzer: a hardnosed journalist and CNN reporter since 1990, Blitzer hosted several programs before being selected to anchor The Situation Room.

Herbert Block (Herblock): a clever and creative Washington editorial cartoonist who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’ and worked for the Washington Post for 55 years, until his death in 2001.

Alex Blumberg: producer for the radio and television versions of This American Life who won the 2008 George Polk Award in Radio Reporting along with Adam Davidson for their explanation of the financial crisis entitled “The Giant Pool of Money.”

Erma Bombeck: a columnist and author whose column on living in suburbia was syndicated in 900 newspapers from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Margaret Bourke-White: a photographer who was among the first women to report on wars and whose pictures appeared on the cover of Life magazine, beginning in 1936.

James Boylan: a journalist and professor, Boylan was the founding editor of the Columbia Journalism Review in 1961.

Ben Bradlee: executive editor at the Washington Post from 1968 to 1991, who supervised the paper’s revelatory investigation of the Watergate scandal.

Ed Bradley: a reporter who covered the Vietnam War, the 1976 presidential race, and the White House at CBS and who was a correspondent on 60 Minutes for 26 years.

Mary Marvin Breckinridge: a photojournalist and filmmaker, during World War II, she was hired as the first female news broadcaster for CBS.

Jimmy Breslin: street-wise, storytelling New York City columnist for the city’s tabloids over many decades in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

David Brinkley: co-anchor of the top-rated Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC from 1956 to 1970, which he followed by a distinguished career as an anchor and commentator at NBC and ABC News.

David Broder: influential Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and columnist, who joined the Washington Post in 1968.

Tom Brokaw: anchored NBC’s Nightly News and the network’s special-events coverage, including elections and September 11, from 1982 to 2004.

David Brooks: a journalist who has written for the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, and since 2003 has been a columnist for the New York Times.

Heywood Broun: an editor, drama critic, sports writer and columnist who helped found the American Newspaper Guild in 1933.

Earl Brown: a journalist and politician who won acclaim for a series of articles on race that was published in Harper’s and Life magazines between 1942 and 1944.

Tina Brown: a writer, journalist and editor, known for livening up staid publications, Brown edited Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker, from 1992 to 1998, before co-founding the Daily Beast; she is currently editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast and Newsweek.

Ron Brownstein: an influential national-affairs reporter and columnist, beginning in the 1980s, mostly for the Los Angeles Times; Brownstein has received multiple awards for his coverage of presidential campaigns.

Edna Buchanan: a police reporter at the Miami Herald, Buchanan won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for crime reporting.

Pat Buchanan: in and out of politics himself beginning in the 1960s, Buchanan has been a popular conservative columnist and television commentator.

Art Buchwald: a Pulitzer Prize-winning satirist whose humor column, which began in the International Herald Tribune in 1949, was eventually syndicated to more than 550 newspapers.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: editor, columnist, author, and TV host who founded the National Review in 1955.

Herb Caen: a Pulitzer Prize-winning, must-read culture columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1938 into the 1990s.

Abraham Cahan: a Russian refugee who helped found the Jewish Daily Forward in 1897, which became America’s largest ethnic newspaper and which he edited for almost fifty years.

Jimmy Cannon: a venerated, imitated New York sports writer (except for some stints reporting on war), for the New York Post then the Hearst newspapers, from the 1940s through the 1960s; perhaps his most memorable line was about the African-American boxer Joe Louis: “He is a credit to his race – the human race.”

Robert Capa: a photographer who documented major historic events including the D-Day landings and the Spanish Civil War; Capa became an American citizen in 1946.

Truman Capote: a novelist whose exhaustively reported and lyrically written 1965 “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood, was one of the most respected works of “new journalism.”

Rachel Carson: a science writer whose 1962 book Silent Spring called attention to the dangers of pesticides and helped inspire the environmental movement.

Hodding Carter Jr.: a southern journalist who launched the popular Delta Democrat-Times and crusaded for tolerance, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials.

John Chancellor: a newspaper and television reporter who worked at the Chicago Sun-Times, as the anchor of the NBC Nightly News from 1970 to 1982, and as the director of the Voice of America.

C.J. Chivers: a New York Times reporter acclaimed for his reports on Russia and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Frank I. Cobb: editor of the New York World, then perhaps the top newspaper in the United States, from 1904 to 1923.

Steve Coll: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who also served as managing editor at the Washington Post, Coll is now a foreign-policy reporter and blogger for the New Yorker.

Charlie Cook: a journalist and political analyst; his Cook Political Report has provided respected election forecasts since 1984.

Anderson Cooper: has covered important national and international stories for CNN and 60 Minutes and now hosts Anderson Cooper 360.

Howard Cosell: an aggressive, even abrasive, sports broadcaster, Cosell was one of the first Monday Night Football announcers in 1970 and was on the show until 1983; he was known for his unvarnished commentary and sympathetic reporting on Muhammad Ali.

Katie Couric: award winning co-host of the Today show on NBC from 1991 to 2006; anchor of the CBS Evening News from 2006 to 2011, for which she conducted a revealing interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008.

Richard Ben Cramer: a journalist and writer whose exhaustive book on the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, was published in 1993.

Walter Cronkite: a reporter who became the best known and perhaps most respected American television journalist of his time as the anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981.

Leon Dash: a journalist and professor who won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on the underclass, “Rosa Lee’s Story,” published in the Washington Post starting in September 1994.

Adam Davidson: a journalist who focuses on business and economics issues at NPR and who produced along with Alex Blumberg the much-downloaded explanation of the financial crises, “The Giant Pool of Money.”

Belva Davis: one of the first female African-American television news anchors in the US on KPIX-TV in San Francisco in 1966, Davis’ news coverage earned her five Emmy Awards.

Richard Harding Davis: journalist and fiction writer, whose powerfully written reports on major events, such as the Spanish-American War and the First World War, made him one of the best-known journalists of his time.

Frank Deford: an award-winning sports journalist and columnist, his articles have appeared in Sports Illustrated since 1962.

Peggy Hull Deuell: covered World War I as the first female war correspondent accredited by the US government; later a respected columnist.

Nancy Dickerson: a radio and television newswoman and documentary producer who was CBS’s first female correspondent in 1960 and then covered the White House for NBC News.

Joan Didion: a literary journalist, novelist and memoirist, who helped invent “new journalism” in the 1960s and whose judgmental but superbly written articles have become standard texts in many journalism departments.

Dorothy Dix”: Elizabeth M. Gilmer, known by her pseudonym “Dorothy Dix,” started out as a crime reporter at the New York Journal, but is best known for pioneering an advice column in 1895, which appeared in over 250 newspapers and lasted 50 years.

Sam Donaldson: prominent reporter known for his tough questioning of politicians; ABC News’ chief White House correspondent from 1977 to 1989, and again from 1998 to 1999.

Maureen Dowd: a New York Times columnist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her pieces on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Matt Drudge: editor and creator of one of the first successful Web news sites, the Drudge Report, which broke the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal in 1998.

W.E.B. Du Bois: a sociologist, civil rights activist, editor, and journalist who is best-known for his collection of articles, The Souls of Black Folk, and for his columns on race during his tenure as editor of The Crisis, 1910–1934.

David Douglas Duncan: a photographer who covered the Korean War and other conflicts.

Finley Peter Dunne: an influential journalist, humorist and writer who created the satirical character “Mr. Dooley”; his columns remained popular until the First World War.

John Gregory Dunne: a journalist, essayist, literary critic, screenwriter and novelist, Dunne wrote nonfiction books and essays on Hollywood, crime and politics from the 1960s until his death in 2003.

Alice Dunnigan: a journalist and civil rights activist, in 1948 she became the first African-American female correspondent to receive White House credentials.

Walter Duranty: New York Times’ Moscow reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for predicting Joseph Stalin’s rise to power.

Douglas Edwards: became in 1948 one of America’s first television newscasters, hosting a show that became CBS’s Douglas Edwards with the News, and later morphed into the CBS Evening News.

Barbara Ehrenreich: a journalist and political activist who authored 21 books, including Nickel and Dimed, published in 2001, an expose of the living and working conditions of the working poor.

Linda Ellerbee: Ellerbee brought a tough, hip style to television journalism through her work as a co-host of NBC News Overnight, ABC’s Our World, and Nickelodeon’s award-winning Nick News.

Nora Ephron: a columnist, humorist, screenwriter and director, who wrote clever and incisive social and cultural commentary for Esquire and other publications beginning in the 1960s.

Rowland Evans: Evans co-founded the column Inside Report, the longest running syndicated political column in US history, in 1963 with Robert Novak, and was one of the first prominent journalists to join CNN.

Walker Evans: a photographer who reported Let Us Now Praise Famous Men along with James Agee and earned acclaim for documenting of the faces of the Great Depression.

Edith Eyde: also known by her pen name “Lisa Ben,” Eyde created the first lesbian publication, Vice Versa, in the late 1940s, helping to pioneer the LGBT movement.

Clay Felker: with Milton Glaser in 1968 launched New York magazine, which he had edited when it was a supplement to the Herald Tribune, and helped invent what became the most widely imitated style of magazine journalism in the late twentieth century and beyond.

Dexter Filkins: a wartime reporter and author who writes for the New Yorker, Filkins won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 along with several other New York Times journalists for reports from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Frances FitzGerald: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who went to Saigon in 1966 and in 1972, published one of the most influential critiques of the war, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.

Janet Flanner (Genet): a journalist who wrote a series of ‘Letters from Paris,’ chronicling the city’s emergence from the Occupation for the New Yorker.

Reuven Frank: president of NBC News from 1968 to 1973, reporter, documentary maker, and broadcast television pioneer, Frank produced the Huntley-Brinkley Report, and won an Emmy Award for the documentary The Tunnel.

Pauline Frederick: wrote for the New York Times and worked for NBC Radio in the 1930s; Frederick was also one of the first female network television reporters.

Thomas Friedman: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author, Friedman began writing his column on foreign affairs, economics and the environment for the New York Times in 1995.

Fred Friendly: president of CBS News in the mid-1960s and the co-creator of the television program “See It Now”; produced an investigation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the renowned 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame.”

Hugh Fullerton: a sports journalist and one of the founders of the Baseball Writers Association of America, his investigative reporting uncovered the ‘Black Sox’ 1919 World Series scandal.

Joe Galloway: a respected United Press International foreign correspondent who first went to Vietnam in 1965; his recollections of one of the first major US battles in that war, for which he later won a Bronze Star for helping to rescue a soldier, won a National Magazine Award in 1991.

Dave Garroway: an easygoing radio and television host who helped popularize the morning-television show genre as the founding host of NBC’s Today show, from 1952 to 1961.

Marcus Garvey: published and edited the influential African-American weekly the Negro World in 1918.

Martha Gellhorn: a World War II correspondent whose articles were collected in The Face of War; she also covered the Vietnam War and the Six Day War in the Middle East.

Tim Giago: a journalist and publisher, Giago founded the Lakota Times in 1981, the first independently owned Native-American newspaper in the US.

Floyd Gibbons: a wartime correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he became well known for his coverage of the 1916 Pancho Villa Expedition, and for his early appearance on NBC radio news.

Milton Glaser: an influential graphic designer who launched New York magazine with Clay Felker in 1968, thereby introducing perhaps the most widely imitated late-twentieth century style of magazine journalism.

Pedro J. Gonzalez: a radio host who created a Spanish-language morning radio show in 1929, which he continued from Tijuana after his deportation from the US.

Mal Goode: a news correspondent and radio host, hired by ABC in 1962 as America’s first African-American network television reporter.

Stephen Jay Gould: a paleontologist and Harvard professor, Gould was also a premier science journalist whose thoughtful, gracefully written, much-loved essays appeared in Natural History.

Philip Gourevitch: a staff writer for the New Yorker, reported on the Rwanda genocide in his 1998 book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

Katherine Graham: a publisher who took over the Washington Post after her husband’s suicide in 1963, she resisted White House pressure during the paper’s printing of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigation; her memoir won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Linda Greenhouse: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered the US Supreme Court for the New York Times for more than 25 years, beginning in 1978.

John Gunther: journalist, novelist and memoirist, Gunther was a foreign-correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in the 1920s and 1930s; his series of “Inside” books, including Inside Europe, were prized for their insights; best known today for his memoir of his son’s battle with a brain tumor: Death Be Not Proud.

Helen Gurley Brown: wrote the bestselling Sex and the Single Girl in 1962; edited Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1997, helping introduce a successful mix of sex and self help.

Carol Guzy: a photojournalist who began working at the Washington Post in 1988 and has won the Pulitzer Prize four times for her work around the world.

David Halberstam: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, known for his coverage of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, politics, and sports.

Pete Hamill: reporter, columnist, editor, memoirist and novelist who, beginning with a job as a reporter at the New York Post in 1960, reported, edited or wrote for most of New York City’s newspapers and many magazines.

Henry Hampton: an award-winning filmmaker, Hampton made many films that dealt with social justice and inequality in America, including Eyes on the Prize about the civil-rights movement.

Paul Harvey: his news and comment program on ABC Radio debuted in 1951 and lasted into the twenty-first century.

William Randolph Hearst: owner and publisher of numerous sensational, crusading newspapers and magazines, most famously the New York Journal; owned a 28-newspaper chain by the mid-1920s; Hearst’s media empire also included radio stations, a movie studio and two news services.

Gabriel Heatter: a radio broadcaster for the Mutual Broadcasting System who covered, among other things, the trial of Bruno Hauptmann and World War II.

Ben Hecht: a reporter, screenwriter, playwright and novelist, beginning in 1921 he expanded the focus of journalism with impressionistic portraits of non-extraordinary city life for the Chicago Daily News, collected in the book, One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.

W. C. Heinz: a sportswriter then a war correspondent then a sports columnist for the New York Sun from 1937 until the paper’s death in 1950; after that a magazine writer; perhaps best known for his concise, understated but emotional 1949 account of the death of a promising young racehorse.

Ernest Hemingway: a novelist and journalist, who reported on Europe during war and peace for a variety of North American publications.

Nat Hentoff: who with his Village Voice column, which began in 1957, crusaded, even against some liberal orthodoxies, for civil liberties.

Bob Herbert: who wrote a column for the New York Times from 1993 to 2011 that dealt with poverty, racism, the Iraq War, and politics.

Michael Herr: who covered the Vietnam War with unprecedented rawness and cynicism for Esquire and wrote the book Dispatches, a partially fictionalized account of his experiences in Vietnam.

Charles Herrold: a radio reporter whose makeshift radio station, on the air from 1909 to 1917, eventually evolved into San Francisco’s KCBS, by some measures America’s oldest radio station.

John Hersey: a journalist and novelist whose thoroughly reported and tightly written account of the consequences of the atomic bomb America dropped on Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1946 and became one of the most read books in America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Seymour Hersh: a long-time investigative reporter, specializing is national security issues, who earned acclaim for his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the massacre by American soldiers at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968, as well as his 2004 reports about American mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

Don Hewitt: a television news producer who helped invent the evening news on CBS, produced the first televised presidential debate in 1960, extended the CBS Evening News from 15 to 30 minutes in 1963, and later introduced and served as the long-time executive producer of 60 Minutes.

Carl Hiassen: a journalist and novelist who has been writing his acclaimed column for the Miami Herald since 1985.

Lorena Hickok: an Associated Press reporter, beginning in 1928, who covered politics and the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Marguerite Higgins: a wartime correspondent who advanced the cause of equal access for female war correspondents and won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Korean War.

Christopher Hitchens: a prolific journalist with a large vocabulary and no fear of controversy, who wrote many widely discussed books and wrote columns for the Nation and Vanity Fair.

John Hockenberry: an award-winning journalist and author who served as the first host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, later joined NBC and MSNBC, and now hosts the Takeaway on public radio; Hockenberry is also a prominent figure in the disability-rights movement.

Don Hollenbeck: a CBS radio and television reporter and host of CBS Views the Press, he also worked in London during World War II for NBC.

Arianna Huffington: a columnist and co-founder of the Huffington Post in 2005.

Langston Hughes: a poet and playwright, Hughes also wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Defender from 1942 to 1962.

Brit Hume: a political commentator and television journalist, Hume was ABC’s Chief White House Correspondent before moving to Fox News Channel in 1998.

Paul Hume: the music editor at the Washington Post for more than three decades and a radio host, Hume was known for his frankness, famously criticizing the singing of President Truman’s daughter, Margaret.

Gwen Ifill: a journalist and anchor, Ifill has worked for the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NBC; she is currently a senior correspondent for the Newshour on PBS.

Michael Isikoff: an investigative journalist at NBC News who had worked as an investigative reporter for Newsweek from 1994 to 2010, Isikoff has written about the war on terrorism, Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, politics, among other issues.

Molly Ivins: a feisty, often outrageous humorist and populist, who wrote about national and Texas politics mostly for Texas publications before her death from breast cancer in 2007.

Peter Jennings: a long-time ABC television reporter, he anchored World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005.

Frances Johnston: one of the earliest and best-known female photojournalists, Johnston covered a range of stories, including the Spanish-American War, photographed many politicians and, in the 1920s, focused on architecture.

Ward Just: a correspondent from 1959 to 1969 for Newsweek and the Washington Post, where he covered, with considerable skill, Vietnam; left journalism to write fiction.

Pauline Kael: an influential film critic for the New Yorker, from 1968 to 1991; Roger Ebert calls her “the best writer ever to write about film.”

H.V. Kaltenborn: popular radio newsman who got his start at CBS in 1928, he pioneered the reporting of news with analysis and opinion on the radio.

Al Kamen: an award-winning national columnist who created the In the Loop column for the Washington Post in 1993, Kamen has covered local and federal courts, as well as the Supreme Court and the State Department.

Murray Kempton: a journalist whose long, stately sentences and short tolerance for pretense made him one of New York’s most revered columnists and reporters; he wrote for the New York Post, the New York Review of Books, and, beginning in 1981, for Newsday.

Walter Kerr: a writer and theater critic, Kerr covered Broadway for New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, winning the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Bernard Kilgore: the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor from 1941 to his death in 1967, Kilgore helped to increase the newspaper’s circulation from 33,000 to more than one million.

James J. Kilpatrick, Jr.: popular pundit who began writing the column “A Conservative View” in 1964, before joining the program 60 Minutes as a commentator.

Yunghi Kim: an award-winning photojournalist who has covered many international events, including the conflicts in Somalia and South Africa, and the genocide in Rwanda.

Larry King: a television and radio talk-show host whose CNN show Larry King Live brought politicians and other well known personalities into the homes of millions of Americans for 25 years, before his retirement in 2010.

Michael Kinsley: a political journalist and columnist, edited the New Republic, co-hosted CNN’s Crossfire and was the founding editor of the online journal Slate.

Willard M. Kiplinger: newspaper pioneer who started the weekly Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923.

Ezra Klein: who began blogging while still in college, now writes a blog for the Washington Post and columns for the Post and Bloomberg; he specializes in public policy.

Ted Koppel: a television reporter and anchor who started a late-night news show in 1979 that eventually became Nightline.

Jane Kramer: a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1964, writing mostly from Europe.

Nicholas Kristof: a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist at the New York Times and Washington Post, with an intense focus on human rights, particularly overseas.

William Kristol: a political analyst and columnist, he is the founder and editor of the opinion magazine the Weekly Standard, which he started in 1995.

Arthur Krock: New York Times columnist and Washington bureau chief from 1932 to 1953, Krock won four Pulitzer Prizes.

Steve Kroft: 60 Minutes correspondent since 1989, his notable achievements have included interviewing Bill and Hillary Clinton on allegations of infidelity in 1992 as well as reporting on Chernobyl in 1990 and, with producer Leslie Cockburn, on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in 2000.

Paul Krugman: a Nobel Prize winner in economics, Krugman has been an op-ed columnist for the New York Times since 1999.

Charles Kuralt: Kuralt reported “On the Road” features for the CBS Evening News beginning in 1967 and later anchored CBS News Sunday Morning.

Howard Kurtz: was at the Washington Post from 1981 to 2010; he became a media reporter there, at CNN and now for the Daily Beast.

Sam Lacy: a sportswriter and columnist, he campaigned to desegregate Major League Baseball and in 1948 became the first African-American member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Brian Lamb: the founder of, CEO of and a host on C-SPAN.

“Ann Landers”: this pseudonym, first used by Ruth Crowley at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1943, would become associated for 56 years, beginning in 1955, with Eppie Lederer and her widely syndicated newspaper advice column.

John Lardner: wrote for the New Yorker from the 1930s through the 1950s about movies, television and war, and for Newsweek about sports – usually with a light touch.

Ring Lardner: a writer and sports columnist, Lardner was known for his satirical coverage of sports and other subjects in Chicago Examiner and Chicago Tribune, where he began writing a syndicated column in 1913.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: author of Random Family, the acclaimed non-fiction book published in 2002 about the relations of drug dealers in the South Bronx.

K.W. Lee: a journalist and columnist who is the founding president of the Korean-American Journalists Association; in 1979 he founded Koreatown, the first national Korean-American newspaper.

Jim Lehrer: Lehrer was the co-host of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report beginning in 1975 on public television, the host of NewsHour and the moderator of eleven presidential-candidate debates.

Nicholas Lemann: a journalist, editor and professor who wrote The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America and is now dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Anthony Lewis: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a columnist for the New York Times from 1969 to 2001.

A. J. Liebling: a New Yorker correspondent beginning in 1935 and an early press critic whose article collections include the acclaimed The Road Back to Paris and The Wayward Pressman.

Rush Limbaugh: began his national, top-rated, hugely influential, conservative radio talk show in 1988.

Walter Lippmann: an intellectual, journalist and writer who was one of the founding editors of the New Republic magazine in 1914 and a long-time newspaper columnist.

Ignacio E. Lozano, Sr.: a prominent journalist who moved to America during the Mexican Revolution; in 1913 Lozano founded what became the largest Spanish-language newspaper at the time, La Prensa, in San Antonio; in 1926 he founded what became the best-selling Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, La Opinión, in Los Angeles; both are still being published.

Melissa Ludtke: a sports journalist whose lawsuit, while she was working for Sports Illustrated in 1977, helped secure female reporters equal access to locker rooms.

J. Anthony Lukas: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best known for his book on school integration in Boston: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.

Mike Lupica: New York Daily News sports columnist since 1977, known for lively opinions and tight, clever writing; has also wandered over to radio and television and produced a weekly column in the news pages.

Robert MacNeil: a writer, journalist and news anchor who covered American politics for the BBC before pairing up with Jim Lehrer to create the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on public television in 1975.

Rachel Maddow: has hosted her own popular, liberal, good-humored prime-time news program on MSNBC since 2008.

Norman Mailer: a novelist, playwright and journalist who received the Pulitzer Prize twice and helped establish a novelistic form of journalism with the books, The Armies of the Night in 1968, and The Executioner’s Song in 1980.

Fred Kinzaburo Makino: founded the Hawaii Hochi, an influential Hawaiian newspaper, in 1912.

Greil Marcus: a journalist and cultural critic who both helped to legitimize rock ‘n’ roll and place it in a larger social and cultural context through such books as Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, published in 1975.

Don Marquis: an author, humorist and journalist in the early decades of the twentieth century, his essays and short stories appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan, Harper’s and Collier’s.

Bill Mauldin: a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who commented on World War II, the Cold War, and the Kennedy Assassination, among many other matters.

Jane Mayer: an investigative reporter who has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1968; her 2008 book The Dark Side exposed the Bush administration’s more questionable tactics in the war on terror.

Mary McCarthy: a novelist and critic, McCarthy’s essays appeared in publications like the Partisan Review, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Joe McGinniss: a non-fiction author whose first book The Selling of the President 1968, detailed the marketing strategies of the Nixon campaign.

Mary McGrory: a long-time Washington reporter and liberal columnist, she covered the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, won the Pulitzer Prize for her commentary on the Watergate scandal and was still writing columns – opposing the Iraq War – in 2003.

Jim McKay: host of ABC’s Wide World of Sports and ABC’s broadcasts of the Olympics; he covered the massacre at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.

John McPhee: a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1965, his detailed, discursive portraits – often explaining some aspect of the earth or its inhabitants – helped expand the range of journalism.

H. L. Mencken: a tough, judgmental, impeccably literate and hugely influential journalist, cultural critic, essayist, satirist and editor, he reported on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial.

Lee Miller: a fashion photographer who took some of the most famous pictures of World War II for Vogue.

Andrea Mitchell: a journalist, anchor and commentator for NBC News and MSNBC, she has been the network’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent since 1994.

Jerry Mitchell: an investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi,

who, since 1989, has reexamined civil-rights cases; his investigations have led to arrests of several Ku Klux Klan members.

Joseph Mitchell: a staff writer for the New Yorker from 1938 until his death in 1995, who won acclaim for his off-beat profiles, collected in the book Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories; Mitchell did not publish any major new work after 1964.

Margaret Mitchell: from 1922 to 1926, the woman who would write the novel Gone With the Wind, was a popular writer for the Atlanta Journal magazine.

Michael Moore: influential, controversial and satiric documentary filmmaker, his films have included Roger and Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002).

Errol Morris: a documentary filmmaker whose works include The Thin Blue Line, 1988, and The Fog of War, 2004.

Willie Morris: became editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine in 1967, while in his early thirties, and led the magazine to something of a golden age – publishing such writers as William Styron, Norman Mailer and David Halberstam – before he resigned under pressure in 1971.

Herb Morrison: a radio reporter who gained fame for his emotional live description of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which was aired on NBC.

Bill Moyers: an award-winning public-broadcasting journalist since 1971 and former White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, who also worked as the publisher of Newsday and senior analyst for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

Willard Mullin: sports cartoonist for the New York World-Telegram and Sun from 1934 until the paper’s death in 1966; created the “Brooklyn Bum” to represent the Dodgers.

Rupert Murdoch: first brought his style of tabloid, opinionated journalism to New York in 1976, with his purchase of the New York Post; but his largest contribution to American journalism probably was founding the Fox News Channel in 1996.

Jim Murray: a long-time and venerated Pulitzer Prize winning sportswriter and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Murray once wrote of the Indianapolis 500, “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”

Edward R. Murrow: an influential television and radio journalist who covered the bombing of London, the liberation of Buchenwald, and helped expose Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in the 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” the plight of American farm workers.

James Nachtwey: an award-winning photojournalist who has documented wars and conflicts all over the world, from Northern Ireland in 1981 to, more recently, Somalia and Sudan.

Victor Navasky: the editor, from 1978 to 1995, then publisher of the Nation; currently the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Nicholas Negroponte: a new-media oriented author, media critic and columnist, Negroponte helped to create Wired magazine in 1992 and co-founded the MIT Media Lab.

Lars-Erik Nelson: a Washington reporter, bureau chief and columnist, mostly for the New York Daily News, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s; Nelson was known for the energetic reporting he brought to his columns.

Allen Neuharth: an author and columnist and media executive, he founded USA Today in 1982 and the Newseum in Washington, DC.

Jack Newfield: a pioneering, socially committed investigative journalist from the 1960s into the 1990s, mostly for the Village Voice.

Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr.: built a billion-dollar, privately-held, profit-oriented family media empire beginning with the Staten Island Advance in 1922 and eventually including numerous newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations.

Michele Norris: a radio journalist who has co-hosted NPR’s All Things Considered since 2002.

Robert Novak: a columnist, journalist, and author, in 1963 Novak co-founded with Rowland Evans Inside Report, the longest running syndicated political column in US history.

Soledad O’Brien: an award-winning broadcast journalist, O’Brien has worked at NBC and is currently the anchor of CNN’s Starting Point.

Adolph Ochs: the New York Times, when he purchased it in 1896, had a circulation of about 9,000; by 1921 Ochs’ paper, increasingly known for its nonpartisan reporting, had a staff of 1,885 and a circulation of 780,000.

Michael J. O’Neill: editor of the New York Daily News, when it was the nation’s most read daily newspaper; brought the paper new journalistic respectability, even Pulitzer Prizes.

Bill O’Reilly: the host of the most watched cable-news program in the US – the O’Reilly Factor – which debuted in 1996.

P.J. O’Rourke: after he left the National Lampoon in 1981, a libertarian writer and humorist for Rolling Stone and also publications like the Atlantic Monthly and the American Spectator.

Pat Oliphant: the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world, Oliphant won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967.

Charles Osgood: a radio and television reporter whose daily three-minute radio feature the Osgood File has been airing on CBS since 1971 and who hosts Sunday Morning on CBS television.

Ike Pappas: a CBS news correspondent who observed and reported on Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination, as well as the Vietnam War and presidential campaigns.

Dorothy Parker: a poet, writer and critic whose wit and wisecracks distinguished her writing for the New Yorker, which she first wrote for in its second issue, in 1925.

Gordon Parks: an activist, writer, and photojournalist, Parks became the first African-American photographer for Life in 1948.

Louella Parsons: a pioneering and influential Hollywood gossip columnist and radio host, her influential columns reached one in four American households in the 1930s.

Alicia Patterson: a journalist and magazine writer, Patterson was the founder, in 1940, and publisher of Newsday on Long Island, which became one of the fastest-growing post-war newspapers.

Steven Pearlstein: a journalist and Washington Post columnist, he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his economics and business coverage.

Katha Politt: an award-winning author and essayist, Pollitt has written about feminist issues for publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and numerous others; she also writes a column for the Nation.

George Polk: a journalist and radio broadcaster for CBS who insisted on finding his own information, Polk was killed while covering the Greek Civil War in 1948; his colleagues established an award in his name.

Ted Poston: an African-American journalist and civil-rights activist who won the George Polk award for his coverage of the “Little Scottsboro” trial in 1949.

Gabe Pressman: a senior correspondent at WNBC-TV, he helped pioneer local television journalism and has been a New York City reporter for over 60 years.

Dana Priest: author and journalist at the Washington Post, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her reporting on black-site prisons, and in 2008 for her and Anne Hull’s exposé of the mistreatment of injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Ernie Pyle: renowned wartime journalist whose folksy, poetic, GI-centered reports from Europe and the Pacific during World War II earned him the 1944 Pulitzer Prize; Pyle was killed while covering the end of the war.

Anna Quindlen: a novelist, journalist and columnist, her path-breaking New York Times column “Public and Private,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992.

Dan Rather: a journalist who covered the Kennedy assassination and the Nixon White House for CBS and was the longest serving anchor of an American network newscast, the CBS Evening News, from 1981 to 2005.

John Reed: a journalist and political activist, he is best known for his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World, which was a first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ora Eddleman Reed: a journalist and editor, Reed edited Twin Territories: the Indian Magazine in the 1920s, and later started a Native-American radio talk show.

David Remnick: Remnick, a former Washington Post reporter, won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and in 1998 became the editor of the New Yorker, for which he also writes and reporters.

James Reston: respected and influential Washington bureau chief and columnist, from 1974 to 1987, for the New York Times, which he first joined in 1939.

Grantland Rice: known as the “Dean of American Sports Writers”; he wrote this on the 1924 Notre Dame backfield: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”

Frank Rich: joined the New York Times in 1980 as a critic and became one of the most respected theater critics, then later became a widely read political and cultural columnist.

Geraldo Rivera: his investigation for WABC-TV in 1972 of the abuse of mentally ill patients at the Willowbrook State School eventually led to the institution being shut down; went on to a career as an investigative reporter and talk-show host on network, syndicated and cable television.

Cokie Roberts: thoughtful Capitol Hill correspondent for NPR and ABC News.

Eugene Roberts: as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, he led the paper to 17 Pulitzer Prizes from 1972 to 1990.

Eugene Robinson: a journalist, columnist and assistant managing editor at the Washington Post who won the Pulitzer Prize for his opinion pieces during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Jim Romenesko: an editor at Milwaukee Magazine and early adapter of the Internet, Romenesko launched several newsletters and later the blog Mediagossip.com, which was acquired by the Poynter Institute and became the go-to source for up-to-the-minute media news.

Andy Rooney: a popular, straight-talking, somewhat cranky commentator on the everyday for 60 Minutes; his segment, “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” aired from 1978 to 2011.

Mort Rosenblum: A widely respected Associate Press foreign correspondent from 1967 to 2004, interrupted by a few years as an editor at the International Herald Tribune.

A. M. Rosenthal: a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, then the commanding executive editor of the New York Times from 1977 to 1986 – a period of growth and transition; later a columnist.

Joe Rosenthal: a photographer who took the iconic picture of Marines raising an American flag on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II.

Brian Ross: a network television investigative reporter, Ross broke major stories for NBC News from 1974 to 1994 and for ABC News since 1994.

Harold Ross: founded the New Yorker in 1925; edited it until his death in 1951.

Lillian Ross: a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1945; known for detailed, understated profiles and features, and for the book Picture.

Carl Rowan: the first nationally syndicated African-American columnist; he wrote his column, based at the Chicago Sun-Times from 1966 to 1998.

Mike Royko: a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago columnist since the early 1960s and author of an unauthorized biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss.

Damon Runyon: a journalist and fiction writer renowned for his hard-bitten, seen-it-all, “guys-and-dolls,” 42^nd-Street and sports reporting for Hearst newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century.

Charles Edward Russell: prominent muckraker who wrote about government weakness in a 1910 series and wrote several books on socialism in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Tim Russert: Washington bureau chief and political commentator for NBC News; host of Meet the Press from 1991 to 2008; respected for tough questions and clear explanations.

Morley Safer: a CBS reporter who exposed atrocities committed by American soldiers in the village of Cam Ne in Vietnam and reported for 60 Minutes beginning in 1970.

Richard Salant: the president of CBS News during the Vietnam and Watergate eras – perhaps that organization’s golden age.

Maria Elena Salinas: a columnist and since 1986 the co-anchor of Noticero Univision, which is watched by millions of US viewers, and is also shown in Latin American countries.

Harrison Salisbury: won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Soviet Union; New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1949 to 1954; later covered the Civil Rights movement.

Robert Samuelson: a reporter, writer and editor, his columns on business and economics appear in Newsweek and the Washington Post, where he began in 1969.

Marlene Sanders: the first female television correspondent in Vietnam, the first female anchor on a US network television evening newscast and the first female vice president of ABC News.

Sydney Schanberg: Schanberg won two George Polk Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Cambodia.

Jonathan Schell: a New Yorker staff writer from 1967 to 1987, specializing in matters of war and peace, who wrote the cautionary book The Fate of the Earth.

Bob Schieffer: a calm, insightful voice since 1969 at CBS News, where he has served as an anchor, as chief Washington correspondent and as host of Face the Nation.

Budd Schulberg: a sportswriter, for Sports Illustrated, as well as a novelist and screenwriter; his writing about boxing – from Joe Louis to Mike Tyson – led to his induction into the Boxing Hall of Fame.

E.W. Scripps: built the first newspaper “chain” at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century; known for empowering local editors; created United Press in 1907.

John Seigenthaler: a journalist and politician, Seigenthaler was a reporter and editor at the Tennessean and was also the founding editorial director of USA Today.

George Seldes: an award-winning investigative journalist and media critic, Seldes exposed many faults in newspaper coverage and discussed taboo issues in his weekly newsletter In Fact, which he published from 1940 to 1950.

John H. Sengstacke: publisher of the Chicago Defender from 1940, who established the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which strengthened African-American owned newspapers.

Bernard Shaw: a journalist and news anchor, Shaw worked in the Washington bureau at CBS News, as a Capitol Hill Senior Correspondent at ABC, and in 1980 moved to CNN to become the network’s principal anchor.

William Shawn: an editor who worked at the New Yorker for 53 years and ran it for 35 years, beginning in 1952; he is given much of the credit for establishing the magazine’s tradition of excellence in long-form journalism.

Vincent Sheean: a journalist and early crusader against fascism who covered the Spanish Civil War for the Herald Tribune and wrote the memoir Personal History.

Neil Sheehan: covered Vietnam for UPI, obtained the Pentagon Papers in 1971 for the New York Times from Daniel Ellsberg and won the Pulitzer Prize for his book examining the failure of US policy in Vietnam: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.

Randy Shilts: one of the first openly gay mainstream journalists; devoted himself to covering the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s for the San Francisco Chronicle; his book examining that epidemic, And the Band Played On, was published in 1987; Shilts died of AIDS at the age of 42 in 1994.

William Shirer: a wartime correspondent and radio broadcaster who wrote the Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1939–1941.

Nate Silver: began the blog FiveThirtyEight.com to apply mathematical techniques to campaign reporting; his accurate predictions and huge audience during the 2008 presidential campaign led to his blog being licensed to the New York Times in 2010.

Moneta Sleet, Jr.: a photojournalist who won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize – the first African American to win the award – for his photograph of Coretta Scott King.

Hazel Brannon Smith: an influential journalist who became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1964.

Liz Smith: began a gossip column for the New York Daily News in 1976, which became probably the most read such column of its time, was widely syndicated and furthered something of a revival for newspaper gossip.

Red Smith: a highly respected sports columnist who wrote for the Herald Tribune in New York before moving to the New York Times; in 1976 he became the first sportswriter to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

W. Eugene Smith: a photojournalist known best for his photographs of World War II, Smith’s photo-essays were featured in Life and Newsweek.

Susan Sontag: an essayist, novelist and preeminent intellectual, among her many influential writings was “Notes on ‘Camp,’” published in 1964; a human-rights activist, she wrote about the plight of Bosnia for the Nation in 1995 and even moved to Sarajevo to call further attention to that plight.

Lawrence Spivak: publisher of the magazine the American Mercury, Spivak co-created, in 1945, produced, and hosted, until 1975, the NBC News interview program Meet the Press.

Susan Stamberg: a radio journalist who helped to found public broadcast radio in the 1960s, and was one of the first hosts of NPR’s All Things Considered.

James B. Steele: an investigative journalist who, along with his colleague Donald L. Barlett, won two Pulitzer Prizes and multiple other awards for his investigative series from the 1970s through the 1990s at the Philadelphia Inquirer and later at Time magazine.

Lincoln Steffens: while Shame of the Cities was published, in book form, in 1904 – more than 100 years ago – Steffens career as an influential journalist certainly continued, and included an interview with Lenin after the revolution and reporting from Mussolini’s Italy.

John Steinbeck: a novelist and journalist who exposed the hardships of Okie migrant camp life in the San Francisco News in 1936, covered World War II and wrote newspaper columns in the 1950s.

Gloria Steinem: a social activist and writer, Steinem co-founded the women’s magazine Ms. in 1972.

I. F. Stone: an investigative journalist who published his own newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, from 1953 to 1967.

Andrew Sullivan: an early blogger and former editor of the New Republic, Sullivan is known for his blog the Daily Dish.

John Cameron Swayze: NBC’s first television newscaster in 1949 on the 15-minute Camel News Caravan.

Herbert Bayard Swope: a reporter and editor at the New York World who won the first Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917 for a series on Germany and later edited the World’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Klan Exposed.”

Gay Talese: a literary journalist; author of the renowned 1966 Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and of many thoroughly reported, gracefully written books.

Studs Terkel: hosted a radio interview program on WFMT in Chicago from 1952 to 1997 and wrote oral histories that often emphasized work and working people.

Lowell Thomas: a radio broadcaster who rose to fame with his multimedia lectures on “Lawrence of Arabia,” Thomas later appeared regularly on NBC and CBS Radio, delivered the first regular television newscast in the US, and was for a time, in the middle of the twentieth century, perhaps the best-known journalist in America.

Dorothy Thompson: her reporting on Hitler and the rise of Nazism led to her being expelled from Germany in 1934; also a widely syndicated newspaper columnist, a rare female voice in radio news in the 1930s and the “second most influential woman in America,” after Eleanor Roosevelt, according to Time magazine in 1939.

Hunter S. Thompson: created the uninhibited, self-parodying ‘gonzo’ style of journalism in the 1960s and 1970s, covered the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, and wrote the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Sallie Tisdale: an editor and writer of deeply felt, often first-person pieces for magazines like Harper’s, the New Yorker, Salon and the New York Times.

Chuck Todd: chief White House correspondent and political director at NBC News in the first decade of the twentieth century, he has pioneered the use of new media.

Nina Totenberg: an award-winning legal affairs correspondent at NPR, which she joined in 1975, Totenberg covers national politics as well as the US Supreme Court.

Dallas Townsend: a broadcast journalist who wrote and anchored the CBS World News Roundup on radio from the 1950s into the 1980s and stayed at the network for 44 years.

Garry Trudeau: the creator of the Doonesbury cartoon, in 1975 he became the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize for a comic strip.

Nick Ut: an Associated Press photographer who took the iconic photograph of a burning girl running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.

“Abigail Van Buren”: the pseudonym adopted by Pauline Phillips in 1956 for what would become a hugely popular newspaper advice column: Dear Abby.

Mary Heaton Vorse: a journalist and activist whose essays on women’s rights and civil rights appeared in New Republic, McClure’s Magazine, New York World in the first half of the twentieth century.

Mike Wallace: an investigative reporter, who was one of the founding correspondents at 60 Minutes in 1968 and reported for the show through 2008.

Barbara Walters: a journalist, known for her interviewing skills, and host of many influential ABC programs, including the ABC Evening News and 20/20.

George Watson: a prominent photojournalist who became the first full-time photographer for the Los Angeles Times in 1917.

“Weegee”: the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig a prominent photojournalist who focused on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1930s and 1940s.

Ida B. Wells: prominent civil rights activist whose 1892 editorial on the lynching of three black men earn her popularity; she wrote her autobiography Crusade for Justice in 1928.

E. B. White: the author of the popular children’s books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and the co-author of The Elements of Style, White contributed to the New Yorker for about six decades, beginning in 1925.

Paul White: a journalist and radio broadcaster, White became the first news director at CBS in 1930.

Theodore White: a political journalist and historian who pioneered behind-the-scenes campaign reporting in his book The Making of the President: 1960, the first of many in the series.

William Allen White: an editor and writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for his editorial “To an Anxious Friend,” published in the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette.

Signe Wilkinson: an editorial cartoonist at the Philadelphia Daily News, in 1992 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

George Will: a conservative journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose Washington Post column, begun in 1974, is syndicated to over 400 newspapers.

Ellen Willis: pioneering feminist writer and rock-music critic from the 1960s into the twenty-first century for the New Yorker and, for many years, the Village Voice.

Walter Winchell: a powerful and widely read newspaper gossip columnist who also had the top-rated radio show in 1948.

Oprah Winfrey: Winfrey rose from hosting a low-rated morning talk show in Chicago to becoming America’s number-one daytime television host with her eponymous, intimate talk show.

Frederick Wiseman: a cinéma vérité filmmaker whose career began with an expose of a state-run mental hospital, Titicut Follies in 1967.

Tom Wolfe: a popular journalist and novelist who helped invent “new journalism” in the 1960s and 1970s with his well reported and kinetically written articles and books, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff.

Bob Woodward: a reporter and editor at the Washington Post whose investigative articles with Carl Bernstein’s helped break the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s; Woodward went on to write a series of book detailing the inner workings of Washington.

Lawrence Wright: a reporter for the New Yorker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.