Les Payne received the commentary award in the print journalism category. He joined Newsday in the 1960s, where he covered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and the Black Panther Party. He won a Pulitzer prize for his extensive covered of the international flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey into New York City. The 33 part series would later become his published book. He has held many jobs during his tenure at Newsday, including serving as the paper's associate managing editor, an investigative reporter and a correspondent. Payne reported extensively from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the United Nations. During the 1976 Soweto uprising, he traveled throughout South Africa and wrote a series that was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in foreign reporting. As one of the founders and former presidents of the National Association of Black Journalists , Payne has worked to improve media fairness and employment practices.

Jeff Koinage received the news magazine award in the broadcast journalism category. He joined CNN in 2001 and is responsible for reporting from across the African continent. Koinange has covered a range of African issues and events, including the violent civil war that led to the overthrow of Charles Taylor in Liberia, the crisis in Darfur and also from Uganda on the refugees. He has covered Nigeria extensively, its politics, its economy and its people and has traveled to numerous other African countries reflecting life on the continent to CNN’s global audience. Although Koinange is CNN’s Africa correspondent, his journalistic talents mean he frequently reports from outside the continent. In 2005 he was part of CNN’s Peabody award winning team who covered the devastation wreaked on News Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. He has also reported from Baghdad on the post-war insurgency, reconstruction and the historic 2005 elections in Iraq. In 2005 Koinange was part of the CNN News team that won the 2005 Peabody Award for "Coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath."

Byron Pitts, the recipient of the news report award in the broadcast journalism category, was the lead reporter for CBS News ' coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and also an embedded reporter in Iraq. He joined CBS News in May 1998 and was based in the Miami and Atlanta bureaus before moving to New York in January 2001. He has covered the war in Afghanistan, the military build-up in Kuwait, the Florida fires, and the Elian Gonzalez story among others. During his career, has worked as a general assignment reporter, a military reporter, and a weekend sports anchor. He was also the guest speaker at the Richard E. Moore Memorial Lecture Series, hosted on N.C. A&T's campus, on April 12, 2007 at 6 p.m.