A veteran insurance journalist found herself being honoured on Saturday night by the very people she had interviewed through the years.

Kathryn McIntyresaid she was shocked to learn she had been chosen for the Bermuda Insurance Institute award.

No stranger to the BII awards, having sat on the Insurance Awards Selection Committee in years past, she said her initial reaction was to question why she had been tapped for the honour.

Indeed, it was Ms McIntyre who announced the first lifetime achievement award at the 1999 inaugural awards dinner given posthumously to captive industry pioneer Fred Reiss.

On Saturday night, Ms McIntyre said she never imagined she would be the one accepting the award in 2004.

"After the initial shock wore off, I became very concerned that I was not deserving of the award." She said that unlike those who had received the award before her, she had not helped to establish the Bermuda market.

"I simply did my job as a journalist ? initially reporting what I saw here for the readers of Business Insurance, and later interpreting what I saw as an editorial writer, speaker and columnist."

Ms McIntyre spent 25 years with insurance trade magazine Business Insurance, retiring in late 2001.

During her time with the must-read for corporate insurance buyers, she made an impressive move up through the ranks. Having joined in 1977 as an associate editor she was, in short order, promoted to news editor, then managing editor, editor and publisher and editorial director.

She was named publishing director in January, 2001.

Having reported on the Bermuda market since the late 1970s, Ms McIntyre recognised early on that "unique conditions in Bermuda" including its regulatory system, infrastructure and lastly, the Island's tax system, could see it become a leading re/insurance industry.

"Bermuda wanted to help solve the risk financing problems of corporations; our core readers at Business Insurance."

The fact that the companies setting up on the Island in the last 30 years have been poised and ready to fill capacity voids for buyers around the world, was something that Ms McIntyre said made Bermuda "a big story ? a big beat ? for Business Insurance".

"My initial, if somewhat naive, impression in the late 1970s was that Bermuda really mattered to corporate American and was finally confirmed when ACE and XL came to Bermuda at the height of the liability insurance crisis in the mid-1980s.

"Capitalised by corporate America, they wrote insurance coverage that insurers elsewhere would not write.

"And with them came many more high profile, seasoned industry executives."

Ms McIntyre said the Island's intellectual capital, and the positive attitude that these executives had, was also a selling point for Bermuda as an insurance market.

"What a refreshing difference it was to interview people in Bermuda.

"While the executives in New York and London were often aloof, pompous and pessimistic about the future of the insurance business and its ability to serve its customers in the face of increasing litigation and rising costs, the people in Bermuda were optimistic they could create a new and better insurance market ? one more responsive to the needs of corporate insurance buyers."

Ms McIntyre said she had openly defended Bermuda-based companies, and said a stinging 2000 editorial rebuke "rolled off my fingers".

In that piece she defended Island companies who had unwittingly been caught up in a push by several US companies, and led by then head of Chubb Dean O'Hare, to change the US tax code to stop what was said to be a loophole that gave Bermuda-based reinsurers a tax advantage.

"I was indignant that US insurers' were attacking Bermuda companies for their successful response to a capacity problem created in the first instance by the American insurers. I received nasty phone calls and letters from the US-based insurers," she recalled.

"There's nothing more satisfying to a columnist than hitting a nerve," she added.

She was praised Saturday night by XL CEO Brian O'Hara, who introduced her at the awards dinner, for her diligence in first reporting on and finally, defending Bermuda's insurance market.

Having dealt with Ms McIntyre since her early days as an insurance reporter, Mr. O'Hara said she had won the respect of the executives at the companies she was reporting on for "really understanding what the business was about".

"It was a male dominated society, but she would not take no for an answer. She became part of the in crowd wherever she was ? and particularly in Bermuda. She has always been a huge supporter of the Bermuda market," he said, adding that it was with "great pride and joy" that he presented her with the award.

Ms McIntyre graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University in 1974 with a degree in journalism. She later pursued an insurance designation, obtaining her Associate of Risk Management (ARM) from the Insurance Institute of America in 1981.

She also obtained the Institute Award for the highest grade in the December, 1979 Risk Management exam.

Besides a two-year stint just out of college with The Lake Placid News, Ms McIntyre spent her entire career with Business Insurance.

She told however that becoming an insurance journalist was not so much a career move, as a case of being in the right place at the right time. "After two years being a reporter with the Lake Placid News, where I reported on everything, I moved to Chicago. The job scene on a daily newspaper there was horrific. It was 1976 and a major newspaper had just closed; everyone was looking for work."

She knew Business Insurance's sister publication Advertising Age to be a well-respected trade magazine and applied. Instead she got a position with BI. The rest is history as they say, having spent the rest of her career based at BI's Chicago office. She expressed no regrets for the path she had taken, saying that she got "hooked" on insurance reporting early on, given the diversity of issues impacting the sector including law, finance and public policy. In accepting the lifetime achievement award, Ms McIntyre praised the team she had worked with at BI saying she could never have accomplished what she had were it not for the strong support she had got along the way from colleagues.

Although in her final years with the magazine she moved on to the publishing side, Ms McIntyre said her heart had always been on the editorial side.

She praised her predecessor, Al Malecki, formerly publisher of Business Insurance as her "mentor," adding that when he left there was no one else she wanted to report to, so she took on that role while also retaining the title of editorial director.

Ms McIntyre, 52, and her husband, Ronald Jacks, retired to New Zealand two years ago. Both Ms McIntyre and Mr. Jacks, a retired re/insurance lawyer, are American but said they chose to move to New Zealand after they fell in love with the country during a 1986 trip.

So enthralled by the country, they moved at lightning speed and that very year bought a home on the North Island.

Now, they spend much of the year there - only leaving during the New Zealand winter to sail off the New England coast - on an oceanside farm where they raise beef cattle and tend an extensive vegetable plot, flower garden and a native garden entirely made up of plants endemic to New Zealand.

Although not engrossed daily in the world of insurance as she was during the last two decades, Ms McIntyre said she still avidly follows developments in the sector and continues to be involved with several not-for-profit organisations including sitting on the Board of Overseers for the School of Risk Management at St. John's University in New York.

She also continues to follow what is happening in the Bermuda market, and said the attributes for success the Island displayed in the 1970s remain today. In addition, the same issues that were impacting Bermuda then continue, in one way or another, to face the Island today.

"Bermuda goes from strength to strength. That's not to say however that you are without challenges. You are still coping with issues that I first heard about in one form or another in the late 1970s. To name a few, concerns that the USA sees Bermuda as a tawdry tax haven and could take punitive action against companies here; demand for talent will exceed supply both in terms of expats and Bermudians; and of course, discussion about independence and what that would mean to the business community."

But Ms McIntyre said she had no doubt that Bermuda would steer a clear course when it came to these issues.

She called on Bermuda-based executives to always bear in mind, and never lose, the creativity and optimism with which they were able to establish this market.

"Now that companies in Bermuda are so established, I hope you don't forget that what put you ahead in the world was your creativity, enthusiasm and willingness to take risks that others would no. In other words, in the years ahead, I hope you will indeed, when appropriate, (and using a saying that she said she and her husband would say tongue in cheek to cab drivers when running late for a flight) drive fast and take chances."