Laurel to the countless gatherers, makers, and consumers of news who over the years have brought to this column, along with their nominations, a shared regard for journalistic ideals and a spirit-lifting faith in the perfectibility of the craft. Meanwhile, for the editor who for more than three decades has appraised those nominations and put a small sampling of the worthiest on public display, there have been more earthly gratifications as well, not the least of which has been the growing awareness of what some today might call (cringe) the D&L brand. The Associated Press, for example, once commissioned an in-house study of the column, presumably for practical application. Mass Comm Journal published a quantitative analysis of the column’s content, category by ethical category, by a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. A major commercial network approached with a proposition for a regular weekly Darts & Laurels segment on a national television show (we respectfully declined on potential conflict-of-interest grounds). The editor of a mid-sized paper confided that when, at a strategy meeting for a new advertorial section, the question arose as to the project’s goals, the immediate answer was this: “To avoid a CJR Dart!” Some (okay, a few) news outlets that hadn’t managed to escape that dreaded fate graciously acknowledged their lapses and mended their ways. At the same time, and impossible to forget, there have been the voices: the nervous tremor in the responses of a Dart nominee, the note of hope in a slighted activist in search of fairer coverage, the anxious whispers of a reporter torn between saving the soul of his newsroom and hanging on to his job.

Were that graduate student in Texas to look today at the evolving content of the column (and of perhaps its microcosmic implications),...

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