John Noble Wilford

John Noble Wilford (born October 4, 1933) is an author and award-winning journalist for The New York Times.

Wilford's professional career began in 1956 at the Wall Street Journal, where he was a general assignment reporter and (after a two-year military tour of duty) a medical reporter. In 1962, he joined Time to work as a contributing science editor, then moved in 1965 to The New York Times (NYT) to be a science reporter. While at the NYT he also worked as assistant national news editor (1973–1975) and director of science news (1975–1979).

Wilford wrote his newspaper's front-page article about man's first walk on the moon. His was the only byline on the front page, beneath the headline "Men Walk On Moon" and under the subheading "A Powdery Surface is Closely Explored.". Upon the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Wilford's article was lauded by journalist Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics. Dubner emphasized Wilford's skill in the use of data in his 1969 article. The data of which Dubner speaks is used in the following way by Wilford: "Although Mr. Armstrong is known as a man of few words, his heartbeats told of his excitement upon leading man’s first landing on the moon. At the time of the descent rocket ignition, his heartbeat rate registered 110 a minute — 77 is normal for him — and it shot up to 156 at touchdown." Dubner argues that this is one of the most elegant uses of data to have been ever used in journalism. Forty-three years after the moon landing, it was Wilford's byline on the Times' front-page obituary of Neil Armstrong.

Wilford won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1984 for reporting on "scientific topics of national import" and one in 1987 as part of a NYT team reporting on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He has also won the G.M. Loeb Achievement Award from the University of Connecticut, the National Space Club Press Award, and two awards from the Aviation-Space Writers Association. John Noble Wilford is also the 2008 recipient of the University of Tennessee's Hileman Disinguished Alumni Award (http://cci.utk.edu/AlumDevel/hileman).