Inducted into MDDC’s Hall of Fame in 2011. This article is based on information submitted at the time.
I wish to nominate Nicholas (Nick) Horrock for the Maryland, Delaware, D.C. Press Association Hall of Fame.
From the age of 14, when he became a copyboy for the New York Times, Nick has devoted his life to the news. He reported on some of the most important events in our lifetimes including Watergate, the influx of new immigrants and covert CIA operations. Starting with Vietnam, he was a war correspondent covering nearly every U.S. conflict.
When it was necessary Nick would take great risks to get his story. As a young Newsweek reporter working on an expose of the nation’s prisons he went undercover as in inmate in the Maryland penitentiary. With only the magazine, the warden and the state’s governor aware of why he was truly there, there was no special protection from either the inmates or the guards. His situation became particularly perilous when a prisoner he had written about several years earlier recognized his name and rumors began to fly around the cell block. Nick got the story and was honored by American Bar Association with a Gavel Award for his extraordinary efforts.
The Gavel Award is one of many honors Nick has won including the Clarion Award and Sigma Delta Chi’s Distinguished Service Award. In 1981, while Investigations Editor at the New York Times, he led a team that won the Pulitzer for their series The Tarnished Door, a look at the immigration system in the United States.
Nick’s first reporting job in Washington was for the Washington Daily News – a tabloid in a town fairly vibrating with competing newspapers. He returned to his tabloid roots in the winter of 2004 when he signed on to help launch The Washington Examiner – one of the very few new papers to be started in the last decade. Nick’s can-do attitude and depth of experience inspired and steadied the young staff during those formative first years.
His energy and clear vision of the extraordinary importance of good journalism continue to inspire reporters today. I hope you feel, as I do, that Nicholas M. Horrock would be a worthy addition to the MDDC Hall of Fame.
Submitted by
Dee Ann Divis
Assistant Managing Editor – News