Nina Totenberg is NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR’s critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Totenberg’s coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, “The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg.”
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill’s charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill’s allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society’s first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations.
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships.
Watch Nina Totenberg’s Goldsmith Career Award fireside chat with Nancy Gibbs starting at minute 39 of the ceremony:
Judy Woodruff
The Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism is given annually for outstanding contributions to the field of journalism, and for work that has enriched our political discourse and our society. This year’s winner is Judy Woodruff, whose groundbreaking career in broadcast journalism spans generations. Best known for her measured, fact-first delivery, she has earned the respect and trust of viewers all over the country.
“Judy has been a fixture on American television screens for nearly half a century,” said Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs. “Always calm, clear-headed and reassuring, she has delivered some of the biggest stories of our lifetimes and has never wavered in her pursuit of the truth.”
Woodruff was the featured speaker at this year’s Goldsmith Awards ceremony, held on March 15, 2023 in Harvard’s Sanders Theater.
Judy Woodruff
Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff is the Senior Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, after serving for 11 years as its Anchor and Managing Editor. During 2023 and 2024, she is undertaking a reporting project, “America at a Crossroads,” to better understand the country’s political divide. She has covered politics and other news for more than four decades at CNN, NBC, and PBS. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award, the Poynter Medal, an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement, and the Radcliffe Medal, she and the late Gwen Ifill were together awarded Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism after Woodruff and Ifill were named co-anchors of the PBS NewsHour in 2013, marking the first time an American national news broadcast would be co-anchored by two women.
For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, where her duties included anchoring the weekday program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984-1990, she also anchored PBS’ award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff. In 2011, Woodruff was the principal reporter for the PBS documentary Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. And in 2007, she completed an extensive project for PBS and other news outlets on the views of young Americans called Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard. At NBC News, Woodruff was White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC’s Today show chief Washington correspondent. She wrote the book, This is Judy Woodruff at the White House, published in 1982 by Addison-Wesley.
Woodruff was a 2005 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She is a founding co-chair of the International Women’s Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women in communication industries worldwide. She serves on the boards of trustees of the Freedom Forum and The Duke Endowment.
Michele Norris
The 2022 Goldsmith Career Award winner was Michele Norris, whose career in print, television, and radio has made her a leading voice on race, identity, and the nature of modern American democracy.
“The music of Michele’s writing is matched by its moral power,” said Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs. “She picks up the hard questions and examines them fearlessly, in a way that has made her one of the great, wise voices of this generation.”.
2022 Goldsmith Career Award winner Michele Norris:
Michele Norris is a columnist for The Washington Post opinion page and her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show, All Things Considered. Norris is also the Founding Director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award-Winning narrative archive where people around the world share their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity –in just six words–as the starting point for conversations about race. Norris is also a National Geographic Storytelling Fellow.
She is the author of The Grace of Silence, A Memoir where Norris turns her formidable interviewing and investigative skills on her own background to unearth long-hidden family secrets that raise questions about her cultural legacy and shed new light on America’s complicated racial history. Norris is currently at work on her second book exploring race and identity in America in the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She has received numerous awards for her work, including Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont Awards. In 2009, she was named “Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists. Before joining NPR in 2002, Michele spent almost ten years as a reporter for ABC News in the Washington Bureau. She has also worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Norris was a 2015 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She is a judge for The Chancellor Awards and a board member for the Peabody Awards. She is also a board member of the President Obama oral history project at Columbia University and the storytelling committee for the Obama Presidential Center under construction in the South Side of Chicago.
Watch Michele Norris’ 2022 Goldsmith Career Award acceptance speech:
Stephen Engelberg
Stephen Engelberg was the founding managing editor of ProPublica from 2008–2012, and became editor-in-chief on January 1, 2013. He came to ProPublica from The Oregonian in Portland, where he had been a managing editor since 2002. Before joining The Oregonian, Mr. Engelberg worked for The New York Times for 18 years, including stints in Washington, D.C., and Warsaw, Poland, as well as in New York. He is chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Mr. Engelberg’s work since 1996 has focused largely on the editing of investigative projects. He started the Times’s investigative unit in 2000. Projects he supervised at the Times on Mexican corruption (published in 1997) and the rise of Al Qaeda (published beginning in January 2001) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. During his years at ProPublica, the organization won 6 Pulitzer Prizes. He is the co-author of “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War” (2001).
Kathleen Carroll
Every year at the Goldsmith Awards Ceremony we celebrate a leading figure in journalism and media with the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. This year’s honoree was Kathleen Carroll, longtime reporter and Executive Editor for the Associated Press, who successfully oversaw one of the world’s largest independent news agencies through a period of intense change in the industry.
Though the 2020 awards ceremony had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are thrilled to honor Kathleen’s accomplishments and contributions to journalism, and to celebrate her extraordinary career with this tribute.
Thanks to the Associated Press and the Committee to Protect Journalists for providing images from Kathleen Carroll’s distinguished career for this video. Thanks also to her colleagues who spoke with us about their experiences working with Kathleen, particularly Kathy Gannon and John Daniszewski.
About Kathleen Carroll
Kathleen Carroll was Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press from 2002 through 2016, where she was responsible for coverage from journalists in more than 100 countries, including groundbreaking new bureaus in North Korea and Myanmar. Under her leadership, AP journalists won numerous awards, among them five Pulitzer Prizes – including the 2016 Pulitzer for Public Service – six George Polk Awards, and 15 Overseas Press Club Awards. She is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she has served on the board since 2008. Carroll first joined the AP’s Dallas bureau in 1978, and was also a writer or editor for the AP in New Jersey, California and Washington. Previously, Carroll led the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, was an editor at the International Herald Tribune and at the San Jose Mercury News, and a reporter at the The Dallas Morning News in her hometown. She currently serves on the board of the weekly Montclair Local newspaper and served on the board of the Pulitzer Prizes from 2003-2012, the last year as co-chair.
Marty Baron
Martin “Marty” Baron began his career in journalism in 1976 as a state reporter for the Miami Herald, and has been the executive editor of the Washington Post since 2013. In between he held senior editing positions at the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Miami Herald. Under his leadership the Boston Globe won the 2003 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the investigation into clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church that was later portrayed in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight”. Baron and newsrooms under his leadership have been finalists or winners for many journalism awards over the years, including numerous Goldsmith and Pulitzer Prizes, in honor of their significant contributions to journalism, civic discourse, and public policy debates in the United States and around the world.
Martha Raddatz is ABC News chief global affairs correspondent and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. She has covered national security, foreign policy, and politics for decades – reporting from the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and conflict zones around the world, including Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, and numerous countries in Africa and Asia. In 2012, Raddatz moderated the Vice Presidential debate, and received the Walter Cronkite Award for excellence in political journalism with a special commendation for debate moderation. During the 2016 election, Raddatz co-moderated the Democratic and Republican primary presidential debates on ABC, as well a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. From 1993-1998, Raddatz was the Pentagon correspondent for NPR. Prior to joining NPR, she was the chief correspondent at the ABC News Boston affiliate WCVB-TV. Raddatz has received four Emmys and numerous other awards. She is the author of The Long Road Home—A Story of War and Family, which made both The New York Times and The Washington Post bestseller lists and was made into a mini-series for TV.
Jorge Ramos has been the anchorman for Noticiero Univision since 1986. He writes a weekly column for more than 40 newspapers in the United States and Latin America, and provides daily radio commentary for the Radio Univision network. Ramos also hosts Al Punto, Univision’s weekly public affairs program offering analysis of the week’s top stories, and Fusion’s AMERICA with Jorge Ramos, a news program geared towards young adults. Ramos has won eight Emmy awards and is the author of ten books, most recently, A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto.
Walter Isaacson, former chairman and CEO of CNN, former editor of TIME, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and author of bestselling books on Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, received the 2016 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and delivered the keynote address, titled “Technology and Journalism.”
Marvin Kalb is a distinguished journalist, author, and the founding director of the Shorenstein Center. Kalb’s journalism career included three decades of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. Kalb is the Murrow Professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club. His 15th book, The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956—Khruschev, Stalin’s Ghost, and a Young American in Russia, was released in October 2017.
