'WSJ,' Russert Dominate Mirror Awards

Was there ever a juicier story for media beat reporters than Rupert Murdoch's successful stalking of The Wall Street Journal? Probably not, judging from this year's Mirror Awards, the citations given out by Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to recognize the year's best media reporting. Among this year's finalists, roughly a third of the entries dealt wholly or in part with Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones.

Joe Nocera, accepting an award for his New York Times column, acknowledged the obvious, quipping, "The first people I'd like to thank are the Bancroft family, without whose dysfunction much outstanding journalism would never have been written."

The other big story of the afternoon was Tim Russert, who was chosen to receive a lifetime achievement award long before that lifetime came to a premature end earlier this month. His NBC colleague Brian Williams accepted on Russert's behalf, saying, "Will we ever see his kind again? No. Will we practice that brand of journalism again? Yes, and we do every day."

The always quick-witted Williams was ready with an ad-lib when the cell phone of a woman sitting at the very front table went off, repeatedly, with a loud and distinctive ringtone. Russert, he said, "would even have liked the fact that someone is playing his theme music on their cellphone....I even know who it is, but we're going to skip that."

In fact, the woman, Joyce Hergenhan, a former public relations executive for G.E., said her ringtone was Beethoven's ninth symphony, not the Meet the Press intro music. "Brian's a friend, so it was especially embarrassing," she added.