Honoring a passionate leader with vitality and the drive to make a difference is the focus of the John P. McNulty prize.

Mr. McNulty—friend, father, husband and business leader—was a partner at Goldman Sachs until July 2001. He retired at age 48 to commit his time to family and philanthropy, and he became involved with the Aspen Institute and the Naples Winter Wine Festival, among other charities.


ANNE WELSH MCNULTY

Mr. McNulty died in 2005 leaving his wife and high-school sweetheart, Anne Welsh McNulty, and three children, Johnny, Brynne and Kevin. "Creating this prize has been a positive thing for my children and me and really enabled us to make a translation of what was our loss into a really positive quest," says Ms. McNulty, 58 years old, co-founder and managing partner of JBK Partners.

The prize, administered annually by the Aspen Institute, carries a $100,000 award. On Tuesday, the prize will be awarded to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede, the CEO and founder of NEXT, a news media company based in Lagos, Nigeria.

"John was a person who was overflowing with vitality and conviction," says Ms. McNulty. "A person with strategic vision, a person with this drive to always do things better smarter, faster and with the kind of energy and enthusiasm and real leadership ability that could make things happen."

The son of Irish immigrants who had made a life as a landscaper and a housekeeper, Mr. McNulty "had this magic that let him go from growing up in a small rowhouse in Southwest Philadelphia to eventually being on Wall Street in that corner office," says Ms McNulty.

"John was an intense, inspiring and, I guess, even occasionally irritating person, but he was tremendously effective," says Ms. McNulty.

Mr. Olojede, 50, has brought intensity to the media landscape by creating a paper and website that is an independent voice in Nigeria and throughout Africa.

After leaving a newspaper career in New York—which included wining the 2005 Pulitzer prize in international reporting for a series of articles for Newsday on the Rwandan genocide —Mr. Olojede founded NEXT, a newspaper that published until recently, and the Timbuktu Media Group. He says that the act of proving that a newspaper couldn't be bought by the wealthy and could be honest "proved to be a revolutionary idea."

Mr. Olojede's first challenge in starting a media company was to secure funding that would be the "least susceptible to pressure," he says. "Because we knew that what we were going to do is stir up all kinds of opposition in the environment, particularly from the political and, to some degree, the business elite."

Training a young, but talented crop of journalists and running a 24-hour newsroom on generators has been an expensive and challenging effort, says Mr. Olojede. The McNulty prize will help him to regroup and expand his efforts to print directly to the Internet. "It also buys us a bit of time to raise money to sufficiently reintroduce the print edition," says Mr. Olojede. "We're undergoing a restructuring of the business side, so the prize money is rather well-timed."




http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204777904576651481119112252.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I hope this will revitalize the website even if the daily print is dead.

Truth must not die totally in Nigeria

May the Irunmoles continue to be with Olojede. Ase!