JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR: Dave Portnoy.

Portnoy wasn’t done. The 2016 Free Beacon Man of the Year established The Barstool Fund to raise money for small business owners. In less than two weeks, the fund brought in more than $8.7 million, and helped save dozens of small businesses from financial ruin. Portnoy’s FaceTime calls with grateful business owners provided the heartwarming content so many of us craved in these difficult times.

Portnoy has offered to go on any network to talk about his efforts, but thus far only Fox News has put him on the air. CNN has better things to do, apparently, like keeping track of Trump’s golfing schedule.

“I didn’t think I’d be the guy doing it,” Portnoy told Tucker Carlson after launching the fund. “I’d rather be sitting on a beach, betting on horses, drinking, but nobody else is going to do it. We have this big platform, so we’re going to try to help as many small businesses as we can.”

For all the awards journalists keep giving themselves, few have ever done anything to deserve one.

Until now.

For perhaps the first time in human history, a media personality has made a positive contribution to society by improving the lives of working people who don’t have time to follow politics obsessively on Twitter.

I’m so old, I can (just barely) remember a time before journalists inverted Chicago Evening Post columnist Finley Peter Dunne’s 1893 notion that “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”