Who wanted U.S. News & World Report? Finalists in the competition were: Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Many U.S. News employees considered Zuckerman, an ambitious Boston real-estate developer and publisher of the Atlantic, the odds-on favorite from the beginning because he was the company’s partner in its Washington, D.C., real estate venture. “He had his foot in the door,” one U.S. News editor says. “Anybody else buying into the thing would have