(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's awards season, but who cares about the Oscars? In the magazine world FORTUNE has just racked up a gratifying string of big wins. On March 5, Adweek hailed us as the No. 1 magazine on its coveted annual Hot List. The next night, in London, the World Leadership Forum handed out 16 awards for outstanding business journalism, and FORTUNE won five--the most of any publication. Our Richard Behar walked away with the evening's top prize: Business Journalist of the Year. Then, on March 12, Ad Age named us No. 3 among its five magazines of the year (we were the only business title in that group). Three days later the American Society of Magazine Editors nominated FORTUNE as one of five finalists for a General Excellence award in the 400,000-to-one-million circulation category (again, none of our competitors made the cut). Not a bad fortnight.

And so, on behalf of our colleagues, we gratefully accept these awards, and we would like to thank our moms, our producers, our agents, our therapists...

Seriously, the people we'd really like to thank are pictured above. As they'd be the first to tell you, any success FORTUNE enjoys ultimately hinges upon the quality of its journalism--to which we say amen. But we know that you can't produce an expensive, lavishly illustrated, deeply reported, carefully written and edited magazine like ours--in a fiercely competitive market, to boot--without the dough-re-mi garnered by an absolutely world-beating publishing team. Happily, we have one.

Last year, under the leadership of FORTUNE Group President Jack Haire, we blew through every record set in our 71-year-history. Before joining FORTUNE, Jack was publisher of Time for five years, and in his last year there Time also made No. 1 on Adweek's Hot List. Coincidence? We don't think so. Jack knows how to win.

Jack's mainstay in driving that effort was publisher Mike Federle, who assumed his job in October 1999 and promptly delivered a 38% increase in ad pages and a nearly 50% increase in ad revenue. If Mike looks familiar even though you've never met him at a sales call, that's because you probably passed him in an airport on one of the 138 days he logged on the road last year.

Circulation wizard Richard Fraiman posts fewer frequent-flier miles but is no less gifted at what he does. In late February, Capell's Circulation Report hailed FORTUNE as among the dozen magazines on its Best of the Decade list (once again, none of our competitors made the cut). Richard has helped keep our average newsstand sales north of 100,000 for the second half of 2000. And our overall circulation has never been stronger.

We have plenty to talk about at FORTUNE, and nobody does a better job of getting the word out than our charming and indefatigable vice president of communications, Terry McDevitt. Three cheers for you, Terry, and also for your colleague in the word-spreading department, marketing director Laurie Howlett.

Finally, if you walk through the Time & Life Building late of an evening (or early of a morning, for that matter) and happen to hear muttered imprecations floating above some Grateful Dead tune, not to worry. That's just FORTUNE Group chief operating officer Chris Poleway, hard at work, counting the money, looking for more, and generally making sure this amazing publishing train stays on track. As everyone at FORTUNE knows, Chris is the man.

Unfortunately, as even a careless reader of the business news also knows--and as our cover this issue makes starkly clear--2001 ain't 2000. It has turned into a very ugly year for businesses of every stripe. It's the kind of climate that separates merely lucky managers from the truly great ones. Which is the other reason we love these guys. We're confident they have what it takes to keep FORTUNE several steps ahead of its competition, no matter how bad the economy gets. And that means, in turn, we can guarantee we will keep delivering our readers award-winning journalism, not just this season, but far into the future.