Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, shown above, and Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, will receive the National Press Club’s most esteemed prize, the Fourth Estate Award, at a Press Club gala in their honor on November 29 in Washington, D.C. Baquet and Baron are the 46th recipients of the award, which recognizes journalists who have made significant contributions to the field.

“As the editors of two of our most influential newspapers, Marty Baron and Dean Baquet have risen to the challenges of our times and emerged as thought-provoking and pathfinding leaders, steadfast in their commitment to excellence in journalism and to the defense of a free press,” said National Press Club President Andrea Edney.

According to a release, the Fourth Estate Award is the top honor bestowed on a journalist by the National Press Club Board of Governors. Previous winners include Wolf Blitzer, Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell, Bob Woodward, Jim Lehrer, Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour and David Broder. The gala dinner is a fundraiser for the National Press Club Journalism Institute, the Club’s nonprofit affiliate, which advocates for press freedom worldwide, provides professional development and training services to the journalism community and scholarships to aspiring journalists.

“At a time when the press  is accused of being ‘the enemy of the people,’ ‘the opposition party,’ and the peddlers of ‘fake news,'” Edney said,  “two of the nation’s most venerable news organizations, the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to rise above the vitriol, producing award-winning reporting and garnering record numbers of digital subscriptions.”

Baron became the executive editor of the Washington Post in 2013. Under his leadership, The Post has won seven Pulitzer Prizes, winning four times for national reporting, once for explanatory reporting, once for investigative reporting and once for public service. The Pulitzer Prize for public service was awarded in recognition of revelations of secret surveillance by the National Security Agency. Previously, Baron served as editor of the Boston Globe. During his 11 years there, the Globe won six Pulitzer Prizes – for public service, explanatory journalism, national reporting and criticism. The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded to the Globe in 2003 for its investigation into a pattern of concealing clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Prior to the Globe, Baron held top editing positions at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, where his journalism career began back in 1976. Under his leadership, the Miami Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Coverage in 2001 for its coverage of the raid to recover Elián González.

Baquet was named Executive Editor of the New York Times in 2014, having previously served as the paper’s managing editor and Washington bureau chief. Baquet first joined The Times in 1990 as a Metro Reporter, and became the paper’s National editor in 1995 before taking a seven-year hiatus from The Times to serve as managing editor, and later Editor-in-Chief, of the Los Angeles Times. After graduating from Columbia University in 1978 with a major in English, Baquet started reporting for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He was at the Times-Picayune for nearly seven years before he became the Chicago Tribune’s associate Metro editor for investigations and chief investigative reporter, covering corruption in politics. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting in March 1988 for documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 in the investigative reporting category.