When the National Press Foundation hands out its annual awards late in February, the Chairman's Citation for Overall Excellence in Journalism will go to the New York Times for its coverage of events related to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

It will be a thoroughly well-deserved award. The Times rose to September 11 like a trout to a fly, producing outstanding coverage of the stories the event generated, whether in New York, nationally or overseas. There were many superb individual pieces of journalism published. But the jewel in the Times' crown was something simple and effective beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Portraits of Grief were short, informal obituaries of those who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. The Times published a page full of them every day from September 18 until they, and the section in which they appeared, A Nation Challenged, were discontinued on December 31. A total of nearly 2,000 portraits of the victims have appeared so far. Others are still being added, though now only occasionally.

They have had a stunning impact on readers the world over. Commentators have been unanimous in their praise.

There are several theories as to why they are so important in the wake of the terrorist attacks, though there does not seem to be one that stands out as an explanation.

My own thought is that there are three things at work: First, the Times has always been a cold newspaper, albeit an excellent one. That it was jolted into suddenly seeming to develop a heart, and into meticulously chronicling the lives of so many ordinary people, has something of the miraculous about it. Second, the attacks have changed people's focus in a subtle way. We appreciate simple, familiar things like family and friends more than we did before. Portraits of Grief speak directly to that change in focus.

Third, and perhaps most important, those little 200-word sketches are a shockingly eloquent reminder of how alike all humans are. We cannot read Portraits of Grief without being struck by how familiar the victims seem, by how much we had in common with them, and by how easily they might have been our own friends or family. Many of the victims were rich in material things. Many of them were not. Yet they were the same. That is a simple truth, yet somehow, every reminder is as fresh as if we were hearing it the first time. Two thousand reminders over the course of three-and-a-half months is very powerful stuff.

The Chairman's Citation will confirm the New York Times' present position as one of the half dozen best newspapers in the world, if not the best.

It has been near the top from the standpoint of quality of news coverage, particularly, for many years, but its breadth is something quite recent, into which much effort has gone. Now, some of its sections - the food and science pages seem worthy of particular mention - are also at the head of their respective classes. Even the crossword puzzle has been coaxed by the talented puzzle editor, Will Shortz, into a position head and shoulders above the competition. The Times' photographic coverage of the news also seems to get better and better. As a topical example, the pictures published in November of a terrified, unarmed and wounded Taliban soldier being shot to death on a roadside by laughing Northern Alliance soldiers were about as direct and stark as images get. The Times published a 56-page section in November, to mark the 150th anniversary of its founding. In it, its publishers and staff recalled and celebrated some of the work that had gone into its long history of coverage of the news. In one article, they recalled that even their mistakes were often larger than life, and ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.

"An article about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each," said one apology, published in May, 2000.

Another, published 30 years earlier, read in part: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."

That anniversary publication last November also contained the most significant acknowledgement of error the Times has ever made, perhaps the most significant any newspaper has ever made. The acknowledgement was written by Max Frankel, a well-known American journalist and former executive editor of the paper. Scholars had long criticised the Times for its failure to cover the extermination of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. That would have been a dismal failure for any newspaper, but quite extraordinary for a newspaper whose then publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was Jewish, and whose home, New York, had then, as now, a very large Jewish population.

Just to give the flavour of the way the Times seemed to dodge the issue, on April 20, 1943, a Times front page story appeared about the Bermuda Refugee Conference - talks held here by British and American officials who were concerned about "the refugee problem" that had been created in Europe. Interestingly, the story was written by and published under the byline of Bermudian journalist Edward T. (Ted) Sayer, who later became editor of The Royal Gazette. Although the article was continued on an inside page, and in aggregate quite long, it did not mention Jews at all, despite the fact that they accounted for the bulk of the problem. Onto the end of it was tacked a five-paragraph Reuters wire story, headlined '2,000,000 Jews Murdered'. Judging by the facsimile published by the Times, that headline fitted well within the boundaries of a single column, set in type that looks to be the same font and size as the copy itself. Journalists call that burying a story. Can there ever have been another burial quite as significant?

Mr.. Frankel attributes the newspaper's sparse coverage of what we now call the Holocaust to Mr. Sulzberger's strong belief that Judaism was a religion, not a race, and that Jews should be considered separately from the general population only because of the way they worshipped. With hindsight, of course, we see clearly that that rather misguided belief took the Times farther and farther into a backwater of untruth and hypocrisy. The 150th Anniversary supplement was published on a day in November, along with another score of Portraits of Grief in the section, A Nation Challenged. The supplement, and Mr. Frankel's article particularly, seemed to be another sign that the Times wants to take part in the journalism of the new millennium with a healthy heart beating in its chest.

The National Press Foundation awards are to take place in Washington on Thursday, February 21. It will be interesting to read the speeches.

On a related note, it is worth saying that if the Foundation were to award an honourable mention of some kind to newspapers in small offshore countries for post-September 11 coverage, Bermuda's own Royal Gazette would be a strong runner. For several days, Gazette staff produced stories, pictures and newspaper design that was of an extremely high quality. They managed to wring locally-oriented coverage out of a large number of the facets of a huge and rapidly-mushrooming story and present it all in a way that was visually and intellectually exciting, yet never over the top. Those who have worked as journalists know how much really hard work goes into that kind of sustained coverage, and how bitter is the thought that no one noticed. I hope it was noticed, and I hope Bermudians can extrapolate from it how good at their jobs local journalists are capable of being. Bravo.