Welcome to the 75th Anniversary edition of Dateline Magazine.
To mark our 75th anniversary, we decided to follow in their hallowed footsteps and publish a special issue celebrating the OPC’s long history of distinguished journalism. As you can read in the following pages, some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business have sent us their memories—both in words and images—of the biggest stories of their respective eras.
We’ve broken it down by decade: from China in the 1940s to the Arab Spring of the current decade.
You can’t help noticing the incredible transformation that has taken place in journalism, beginning with Roy Rowan‘s frantic chartering of a plane to ferry film to a waiting darkroom in San Francisco, to Nic Robertson‘s live CNN broadcast using a simple iPhone when the Egyptian authorities confiscated his TV gear. Alan Barth, a long-time editorial writer at the Washington Post, is credited with coining the phrase “journalism is only the first draft of history.”
I hope you enjoy this history as much as I did.
Our thanks go out to the wonderful and brave journalists who took the time to remind us of their big stories and the idiosyncratic personalities who covered them.
Our special thanks also go to Robert Nickelsberg for spending many long hours sorting and selecting (with the help of OPC intern Mariam Haris) the many brilliant and moving photographs that appear in this special report. Incidentally, Robert deservedly won this year’s OPC Olivier Rebbot Award for his photography book about Afghanistan.
1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013