Right Place, Right Time

EDITOR'S LETTER

At around 1:30 P.M. on Swedesday, May 3, I was standing on the podium in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, before 1,400 of my peers at the annual awards ceremony of the American Society of Magazine Editors. The National Magazine Awards are the Oscars of the magazine business, but without the worldwide attention, heartstopping dresses, or Bruce Vilanch.

Well, anyway, I was up there accepting the Reporting award, which was won for two war dispatches from Kosovo last year, one by Sebastian Junger and the other by Janine di Giovanni, and in a rare burst of coherence, I said that, like all good foreign correspondents, they were off covering a war somewhere. And, indeed, both happened to be in the same place, Sierra Leone—di Giovanni for The Times of London and Junger for Vanity Fair.

Junger, a V.F. contributing editor who last month celebrated the third anniversary of his book, The Perfect Storm, on the New York Times best-seller list, has an almost spooky gift for being in the right place before others even know there is a place. Back in March 1998, when most journalists—myself included—couldn't pick out Kosovo on a map, he sensed a story there. He headed off to Pristina and returned to produce the first major dispatch on the war looming there to appear in an American magazine. And Junger was the only magazine reporter in Sierra Leone at the time of the attack on more than 500 U.N. peacekeepers in early May.

There have been other kudos over the past few months. That day at the Waldorf, Vanity Fair also took the ASME award in the Photography category. Mimi Sheraton won a James Beard Foundation Award for her story on the history of the Four Seasons restaurant, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. The.Overseas Press Club of America awarded a Citation for Excellence to Bryan Burrough for his July 1999 story on L.V.M.H. chairman Bernard Arnault's battle against Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole for control of the Gucci fashion empire. Annie Leibovitz won three Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for Magazine Photography, including Cover of the Year for her November Jim Carrey portrait; late last year, she was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. And in May at the Society of Publication Designers Gala, Vanity Fair picked up a Gold Medal and two Silvers for photographs by Leibovitz and Bruce Weber.

Winning the ASME Reporting and Photography honors, though, was especially gratifying because it is the combination of stories and pictures that makes up the essence of what a magazine is. That the Reporting award was for war dispatches was doubly pleasing. I sometimes worry that our coverage of Hollywood and all its appendages—the New Establishment, the Oscar party, the Hollywood Issue, the cover stories, and so forth—tends to overshadow the heart of the magazine, which is storytelling on a grand scale. GRAYDON CARTER