Apr. 17, 2000


Four Win Columbia University's Highest Journalism Alumni Award

By Kim Brockway

Journalism School alumni, left-right: Peter Osnos (Œ65), William German (Œ40), Bonnie Stretch (Œ63), and David Perlman (Œ40).

Four prominent alumni of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism have received the school's highest alumni honor. The winners are: Maurine Beasley ('63), scholar and historian; William German ('40), editor emeritus and columnist, The San Francisco Chronicle; David Perlman ('40), science editor, The San Francisco Chronicle , and Peter Osnos ('65), founding publisher and chief executive of Public Affairs.

German and Perlman are jointly honored for their outstanding contributions to journalism. Each winner received a 2000 Columbia Journalism Alumni Award, given for journalistic excellence, a single outstanding journalistic accomplishment, and/or a contribution to journalism education.

A professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maurine Beasley spent thirteen years as a newspaper reporter, first at the Kansas City Star and later at The Washington Post .

She is the author, co-author or editor of seven books dealing with women and the media, including Women, Media and Politics (1997), Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (1987), and Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism(1993). Now coediting the Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, Beasley is currently teaching in the People's Republic of China as part of the Fulbright Scholars Program.

Beasely received the Distinguished Senior Scholar Award from the American Association of University Women, the Society for Professional Journalists Washington Dateline Award for distinguished service in local journalism, and the Speech Communication Association's Haiman Award for distinguished scholarship in freedom of expression. She is a past president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the American Journalism Historians Association (which awarded her its highest honor, the Kobre Award for lifetime achievement) and the Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

William German has served in a number of positions at The San Francisco Chronicle, including reporter, assistant foreign editor, executive news editor, managing editor and executive editor, and, for 17 years, was editor of The Chronicle Foreign Service, directing a staff of more than 80 newsletter correspondents around the world. As news editor in 1952, he developed the format and direction for sections covering the arts, lifestyle and Sunday news forums. German was one of the founders and the managing editor of KQED-TV's "Newspaper of the Air," which ran during the newspaper strike of 1968 and established the format for other PBS stations' news programs.

German has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize juror and a member of the Nieman Foundation Selection Board. A member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, he is on the board of trustees of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. He is a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the AP Managing Editors Association, and, throughout his career, has nurtured many of The Chronicle's award-winning journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winners Allan Temko and Herb Caen.

David Perlman has covered science and technology for more than 30 years, reporting on fields as varied as research on AIDS, cosmology, clinical medicine, seismic tectonics and geophysics. He frequently writes on major national policy issues in the fields of health care and biomedical research, the environment, nuclear energy, arms control and space exploration.

Perlman began his career in journalism as a copy boy, and then reporter, at The Chronicle. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked as a reporter, city editor and United Nations correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune. He rejoined The Chronicle and quickly became a top reporter in the fields of politics, land use, environmental issues and complex federal tax evasion cases before turning to science writing. For a brief time in the late 1970s he served as city editor before returning to the science beat.

Recognized nationally as a leader in science journalism, Perlman has served as president of the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. He has been a Poynter Institute Fellow at Yale; a Carnegie Corporation Fellow at Stanford; a science writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin; a Regents Professor at the University of California in San Francisco, and is a frequent volunteer lecturer, advisor, and consultant at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley. His numerous awards include citations from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Professional Journalists and is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society.

Peter Osnos is the CEO and publisher of PublicAffairs, the non-fiction publishing company specializing in journalism, history, biography, memoir and social criticism. Before founding that publication, he served as publisher of the Times Books Division of Random House, and before that, its senior editor, associate publisher and vice president, working with authors including President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Nancy Reagan, and many others.

Osnos began his journalism career as an editorial assistant at I.F. Stone's Weekly before joining The Washington Post as assistant editor of the L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service in London. He served in a number of positions at The Post, including Indochina correspondent and bureau chief (covering wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia); Moscow correspondent; foreign and national editor, and London bureau chief.

Osnos has been a fellow/consultant at the Twentieth Century Fund and was a regular commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" and co-host of "Communiqué." He is a contributor to Washington Week in Review, Meet the Press, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Reviewand New Republic.

Previous recipients of the Alumni Award include Bennett Cerf ('20), Molly Ivins ('67), CNN's Myron Kandel ('53),The Washington Post's Dorothy Gilliam ('61), CBS News' Steve Kroft ('75), and the Associated Press' Lou Boccardi ('59).