Robert Guccione, publisher of Penthouse Magazine, was keynote speaker at the 1979 banquet. Headliners chairman Howard Berger explained the unorthodox selection. Guccione was at the time building a $60 million casino hotel complex, expected to become the fourth to open in the city after legalized gambling. “Guccione will be able to relate not only to the journalists,” Berger said, “but also to local residents because of his dual role as publisher and casino developer.”
Headliners always had an eye for new talent. We’ve discovered plenty.
Headliners was first to recognize a midlevel CBS executive, then stationed in Europe, whose job it was to book newsmakers for interview shows. He found himself in Vienna in March 1938 when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria. Via shortwave radio, the executive went before the microphone for the first time, delivering a dramatic account of the Nazi takeover.
“This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. … It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.”
Edward R. Murrow, first honored by Headliners in 1940, preparing a script in a CBS studio in 1957.
Murrow would emerge as one of the stars of World War II reporting for his work in London during the Blitz and would become the namesake for the top award from the Radio Television Digital News Association.
In 1940, a first-place Headliners award went to a relatively obscure editorial cartoonist, Herbert L. Block of the Newspaper Enterprise Association. In four years, he would join The Washington Post and go on to decades of fame and influence as “Herblock.”
A 1950 editorial cartoon by Herbert L. Block where he coined the term “McCarthyism.”
In 1943, Headliners judges found a financial whiz in S.F. Porter of the New York Post. She had written under her initials, apparently so no one would know she was a woman. Headliners didn’t care. She wrote with conversational ease even when giving advice on acquiring government bonds. You know her today as Sylvia Porter, the century’s most-recognized financial author and columnist.
For work done in 1981, judges recognized an infant broadcast with deep potential. ABC News had been doing a nightly report, “America Held Hostage,” reporting on the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. With its fresh-faced host, an unknown Ted Koppel, and a pioneering thrust into the stay-up-late news world, the program would later be rebranded “Nightline” and continue for decades.