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Given the tough financial times the media have been struggling with this past year -- editorial staffs eviscerated, foreign bureaus shuttered, staffers and stringers abroad sacked -- it’s remarkable how much the Overseas Press Club has to cheer about from the viewpoint of quality and professionalism. Journalism at its very best has never been better than right now -- and if you want still more tangible evidence of that reality, just leaf through this annual copy of OPC’s Dateline magazine with its impressive array of award-winning international stories and photography produced during 2007.

Earlier this year, around a nighttime fire at Joint Security Station Tarmiya, near Baghdad, a young soldier turned to Paul McLeary, then a reporter for my magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, and said, "Man, you must be making a lot of money to be here." Paul told him that he would get the same paycheck walking around Iraq as he would sitting at his desk in New York, and that it wasn't an impressive amount anyway, as reporters don't make much.

Shortly after China was picked to host the 2008 summer Olympics there was optimism that, by seeking an international spotlight, the country's ruling interests would be compelled to open up to journalists, Chinese journalists especially. Nothing like that happened. With the games just months away one is left with the impression that in our age the characteristics of a great nation need not include free expression.

In the nine years since he seized power, the general has fostered the growth of a vigorously independent group of private TV stations that have done their best to undermine his rule and restore democracy.

It's been six years since The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. Today most of the dozen men who carried out the crime are in prison or dead.

Covering the war in the frontier regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan presents formidable challenges -- not least of which is overcoming some dangerous preconceptions.