HUGH M. HEFNER
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Playboy 

The founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy, Hugh M. Hefner is a man who has profoundly influenced society since the second half of the 20th century, during which his publication has been the world's best-selling men's magazine.

Over the course of his distinguished career, Hefner has been the subject of in-depth interviews and profiled in most of the world's major print media, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire and Rolling Stone.

Frequently interviewed by major news and entertainment media the world over, in 1996 he was the subject of an extraordinary two-hour profile "Hugh Hefner: American Playboy" on the A&E Network's prestigious Biography series. This program was so well received that it was repeated in its entirety on the network only three months after its original airing.

The recipient of a number of awards for his contributions to society in general and the publishing industry in particular, Hefner received the 1996 International Publishing Award from the International Press Directory in London and was inducted in the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors at its 1998 ceremonies in New York.

Hefner was born in Chicago on April 9, 1926, and educated in Chicago public schools. Following graduation from high school, Hef joined the army, serving as an infantry clerk and drawing cartoons for various Army newspapers. After his discharge from service, he spent the summer of 1946 taking art classes (anatomy, of course) at the Art Institute of Chicago, enrolling that fall at the University of Illinois, where he earned his bachelor's degree in two and one-half years by doubling up on classes while drawing cartoons for the Daily Illini and editing the campus humor magazine Shaft, where he introduced a new feature called "Coed of the Month."

The first issue of Playboy magazine featured the now-famous calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe and was produced on a kitchen table in his South Side apartment. On the newsstands in December 1953, it carried no cover date because Hefner was not sure when or if he would be able to produce another. The first issue sold more than 50,000 copies, enough to pay for the paper and printing costs and to finance another issue.

By 1960, Playboy was selling more than a million copies each month, a figure that soared above seven million copies monthly by the early 1970s.

With Playboy magazine as its anchor, the publicly-traded Playboy Enterprises, Inc. has become a global media and marketing company with Playboy editions in 18 countries, worldwide television programming and home video distribution, a host of international licensed products and a dominant presence on the World Wide Web through its heavily trafficked playboy.com site. Since the 1980s, daughter Christie Hefner has been chairman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises.

Now 75 years old, Hugh Hefner continues to serve as editor-in-chief of Playboy from his legendary residence in the Holmby Hills estate area of Los Angeles, the Playboy Mansion.

RICHARD M. SMITH
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief
Newsweek

As chairman and editor-in-chief, Richard M. Smith is chief executive officer for both editorial and business operations of Newsweek. Rick has been editor-in-chief since 1984, having served in a variety of editorial roles both in New York and overseas for the preceding 14 years. In 1991, Smith was also named president, adding responsibility for marketing, advertising sales, circulation, manufacturing and all publishing operations. He was named chairman in March 1998.

Smith joined Newsweek on a four-week writing tryout in 1970 after completing his degree at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He wrote his first cover story - on the "Black September" uprising in the Middle East - six weeks later. In 1974 he joined Newsweek International as regional editor for Asia based in Hong Kong, and in 1977 Smith moved to New York as managing editor of the international editions. In 1981 he was named assistant managing editor of the domestic magazine and later executive editor.

Taking charge as editor-in-chief at a time when many media critics were declaring newsmagazines "dinosaurs," Smith stayed true to the mission of covering the news. But he revolutionized the way Newsweek did it, introducing innovations that would later be copied by all the other newsmagazines. Smith moved away from the Lucean institutional voice and allowed distinctive, individual voices of writers and columnists to come through. He started to cover news in the back-of-the-book areas of science, technology, health, religion and family just as aggressively as front-of-the-book news. And he introduced more voice and attitude in the magazine, as exemplified by the "Conventional Wisdom" column and "Perspectives" page. Along the way, he promoted and hired a generation of editors that produced not only the future editorial leadership of Newsweek but also top editors at more than a half dozen other major magazines.

Under Smith's leadership, Newsweek has won numerous editorial awards, most recently the 1999 National Magazine Award for Reporting for its coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal - the first time a newsweekly has won in the Reporting category. In addition, Newsweek was also a 1999 finalist in the General Excellence category - which the magazine won in 1993. Newsweek has won more of these awards, given by the American Society of Magazine Editors, than any other newsweekly.

In a magazine marketplace that has undergone increasing consolidation, Newsweek has maintained both its independence and healthy profitability during Smith's tenure and achieved record-high levels for circulation and audience. Circulation is more than 3.1 million in the United States and nearly four million worldwide. Total audience exceeds 19 million in the United States and 22 million worldwide.

Smith maintains a keen interest in opportunities overseas. In 1986 he introduced the first foreign-language edition of an US-based newsweekly, Newsweek Nihon Ban, in Japanese. In later years, Newsweek launched editions in Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish. Newsweek International itself is published in three distinct English-language editions, Atlantic, Asia and Latin America.

Under Smith's watch, Newsweek has been at the forefront in both covering and taking advantage of new technology. In 1993, Newsweek became the first major magazine to produce a quarterly CD-ROM featuring original multimedia stories. In 1994 the magazine went online through Prodigy; in 1996, it moved to America Online. In November 1999, Newsweek, The Washington Post, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, MSNBC Cable, MSNBC.com and NBC News formed an alliance to share news material and technological and promotional resources. In June 2000, the alliance was cemented with the launch of the joint Web site: www.Newsweek.MSNBC.com.