Times Writer Wins Loeb Award

Los Angeles Times staff writer Ralph Vartabedian has won a 1988 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, it was announced Monday.

Vartabedian won in the category of beat and deadline writing for his coverage of Northrop and the MX missile. Northrop has experienced long delays and other manufacturing problems in its Air Force contract to produce a key guidance device for the MX.

The Loeb awards are among the most prestigious given for business journalism. Winners were selected by a panel of independent judges based upon the quality of reporting and writing, news and analytical value, and ingenuity and exclusivity.

The awards were established in 1957 by the late E. F. Hutton Vice Chairman Gerald Loeb and have been administered since 1973 by the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA.

Other Loeb award winners were: for newspapers with circulation of more than 400,000, Daniel Hertzberg and James B. Stewart for “Terrible Tuesday,” the day after the stock market crash, in the Wall Street Journal; for newspapers with circulation of 150,000 to 400,000, David Sylvester for “Down and Out in the Middle Class” in the San Jose Mercury News; for newspapers with circulation of less than 150,000, Paul Farhi for “Anatomy of a Takeover” in the San Francisco Examiner; for national magazines, Robert Heilbroner for “Hard Times” in the New Yorker, and for commentary, Ron Ridenhour for his columns in New Orleans City Business.