JAWS Founder Tad Bartimus wins lifetime achievement award

JAWS Founder Honored by Washington Press Club

By Patricia Sullivan

Tad Bartimus was the Associated Press' first female bureau chief and its first female special correspondent, a rare title only a few reporters earn (including JAWS member Linda Deutsch).

Tad received the Washington Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award Feb. 13, 2008, at the annual Congressional Dinner.

As a young woman, Tad was one of the few female war correspondents in Vietnam (and contributed to a book about that experience, "War Torn: Stories of War by the Women Who Reported the Vietnam War." She covered Alaska and the Mountain West for the AP for many years, then left the wire service, taught at the University of Alaska, and now writes a syndicated feature column for the United Feature Syndicate and a blog for Eons.com from her Hawaii home.

Her alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has also given her a lifetime achievement award. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing (1989, 1991), she also has been honored for her writing by the Associated Press Managing Editors Association more times than any other living AP journalist.

She also wrote the text for "Requiem," a collaborative effort with David Halberstam, Horst Faas and Tim Page that won Overseas Press Club and George Polk awards in 1998. She co-authored "Trinity’s Children: Living Along America’s Nuclear Highway" with Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney, and was a co-author with other band members, including Stephen King, Amy Tan and Matt Groening, of "Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude."