Welcome to Hollywood, welcome to GQ's long-standing annual Tinseltown celebration. Inside you'll find Hollywood golden girl Cameron Diaz; you'll find Alain Delon, the greatest star Hollywood never had; you'll see plenty of Hollywood black tie; and you'll see GQ's own Bafta celebration (which, after the GQ Men Of The Year awards, is the greatest celebration of British talent in the country_. You'll also find rather a lot of the very finest journalism money can buy.

Now, most journalists have more than one occupation. Yes, some of them also write books, appear on television and write screenplays. And some - particularly those who write for us at GQ - are celebrities in their own right. Hyphenates, we call them. But most are hyphenates because, as well as being journalists, they are also deadline surfers, body swerving delivery dates as though they were phone bills or parking tickets.

Of course, we have our own deadline surfers at GQ, some of whom are so bad that they actually file their copy after the magazine has left for the printers (mentioning no names, Adrian, mentioning no names). Most, however, are exemplary. When we commissioned Tony Parsons to write a 250-word article for a portmanteau piece on copying the clothes worn by rock stars on their album covers, Tony's piece on trying to look like Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Born To Run arrived 11 minutes later. "That's what happens when you commission a man, not a boy," said Parsons.

Back in the Sixties, the South Wales Echo started a Saturday sports paper, requiring its writers to file more copy than usual. When it launched, one of the editors called the paper's star writer, Peter Corrigan, and asked if he could contribute a story for the first issue. On being told that he needed to file his copy by Tuesday instead of Friday, Corrigan was understandably agitated. "Look," he said. "What would you prefer? A piece of well-crafted, considered prose on Friday, or rubbish on Tuesday?"

The editor, echoing the thoughts and wishes of sub-editors everywhere, said, "Rubbish on Tuesday."

This being a Fleet Street story, it has many variations, one of which involves an obituaries writer on a now-defunct East Anglian paper. Asked what he'd done when confronted with the option of delivering finely crafted prose on Friday or rubbish on Tuesday, the journalist said: "Well, in the end we compromised. I gave them rubbish on Friday."

Frank Luntz, whose latest piece on the American primaries can be read on page 33, actually filed his copy from a roadside fast-food outlet 20 miles from O'Hare Airport in Chicago. "My computer battery had died and my plane was grounded because of a blizzard. The car taking me to my event pulled over and I sat plugged in with a Coke and a burger by my side to finish the copy. On top of that, a rat jumped over my power cord as I was typing the final paragraph." Now that's dedication. Enjoy Frank's piece, enjoy the issue. (Oh, and enjoy Hollywood.)

Dylan Jones, Editor, GQ