Deadline looms (March 1) for nominating candidates for Outstanding Achievement award

It's a club in which I am proud to be a member. The National Magazine Awards Foundation each year selects one person to receive the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement. (Sometimes people call it the "lifetime achievement", though there's no  chronological requirement.) 

The selection is made based on nominations from the community and the judging committee and the standard is simple: recognizing innovation and creativity through contributions to the Canadian magazine industry. The deadline for nomination is March 1. 

The very first person named, in 1989, was Prue Hemelrijk, a superlative copy editor and fact-checker. Selecting her was done strictly on its merits, but was intended also as a signal that this award doesn't necessarily go only to editors and publishers (though it certainly can and has gone to fine examples of each.) It also recognizes other important roles and contributions including circulation experts, teachers, marketing, sales and promotion professionals, production managers - in short, every outstanding contributor in the industry.

Recent winners include Kim Jernigan, Stephen Trumper, Heather Robertson, D.B. Scott, Terry Sellwood, Cynthia Brouse, Charles Oberdorf, Neville Gilfoy,John Macfarlane and Paul Jones.

National Magazine Awards seeking judges for 38th annual awards

Every year, the National Magazine Awards Foundation relies on the donated time of over 200 volunteer judges to select finalists and winners in the written, visual, integrated and special awards. They are looking for people with one or more of the following characteristics:

• Editor, art director, publisher, web editor or other staff member
• Freelance or staff writer, illustrator, photographer or digital creator
• Journalist with expertise in a particular field 
• Bilingual (all written categories are judged by both unilingual and bilingual juries and most other categories include one or more bilingual members)

To nominate yourself or someone else to be a judge (naturally not in a category where you or your magazine is entered) send name, contact information and a brief bio or summary of your expertise to staff@magazine-awards.com. Judging takes place between February and mid-April and the awards are made June 5.
Further information about the judging process and eligibility and rules.

(I have been a judge several times in previous years and always find it a rewarding experience.) 

Time magazine named U.S. Magazine of the Year

Time magazine was named Magazine of the Year at Thursday evening's U.S. National Magazine Awards event presented in New York by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). The selection was based on its issues about the death of Steve Jobs, the killing of Osama bin Laden and its "Person of the Year" issue The Protester.

Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter accepted the columns and commentary award on behalf of Christopher Hitchens, who passed away in December.  It was the second year in a row that the award went to VF and Hitchens.

Terry McDonell, who as Editor of the Time Inc. Sports Group oversees Sports Illustrated, was elected into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.

Other winners and finalists for the coveted "Ellie" (an elephant sculpture created originally by the artist Alexander Calder) were:

GENERAL EXCELLENCE
  ♦ Inc. (active and special-interest magazines)
  ♦ Bloomberg Businessweek (general interest magazines)
  ♦ House Beautiful (lifestyle magazines)
  ♦ IEEE Spectrum (thought-leader magazine)
  ♦ O, The Oprah Magazine (women's magazines)

DESIGN
  ♦Gentlemen's Quarterly

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
  ♦ The New York Times Magazine

FICTION
  ♦ Zoetrope: All-Story

LEISURE INTERESTS
  ♦ Saveur

NEWS AND DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
  ♦ Harper's magazine

PERSONAL SERVICE
  ♦ Glamour

PHOTOGRAPHY
  ♦ Vogue

Digital Ellies were presented at March 20 ASME luncheon

No women nominated for non-fiction writing in U.S. magazine awards

[This post has been updated} There are no female nominees in the major non-fiction writing categories of the U.S. National Magazine Awards, according to an article by Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Daily News. There are no female nominees among the 25 in reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays/criticism and columns/commentary.  The winners in each category will be announced in New York on May 3.The list of nominees have just been announced by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). Lady Journos blog has compiled a breakdown.

A quick scan seems to indicate that we're unlikely to see a similar anomaly in the National Magazine Awards in Canada  (nominees due to be announced next month) -- women have been strongly represented in all categories. There is a substantial difference between the ASME awards (which reward magazines, rather than individual creators) and the NMAs.
[Update: Sid Holt, the chief executive of ASME, rather brusquely dismissed criticism saying that the controversy was "kind of silly" and citing a number of women writers nominated in the past few years.
“There’s no men’s category — that’s not the way the magazine business works, as a trip to any newsstand will show," he said.]

[Thanks to posts on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserv from Moira Farr and Deborah Birkett for alerting me to this information.]

The New Yorker, natch, leads U.S. magazine awards nominee list

The New Yorker once again leads the pack with a total of 10 nominations, including for general excellence, reporting and feature writing in the American Society of Magazine Editors' (ASME)awards, announced on Wednesday. Close behind was GQ, with 8 nominations, the most that magazine has ever received in a single year.

For general excellence online:

• 1 million or more average monthly visitors: BusinessWeek.com; Chow.com; National Geographic Magazine Online (ngm.com); New York Magazine Online (nymag.com); Time.com
• Less than 1 million average monthly visitors: Backpacker.com; MotherJones.com; Parenting.com; RunnersWorld.com; Triple Canopy (www.canopycanopycanopy.com)

The winners in the various categories will be announced at a gala on April 30 at Frederick P.Rose Hall in Jazz at Lincoln Center.

In the general excellence category for print, the nominees are:

• Circulation under 100,000: The American Scholar; Aperture; Bidoun; Print; The Virginia Quarterly Review
• Circulation 100,000 - 250,000: Foreign Policy; Los Angeles Magazine; Mother Jones; Paste; Time Out New York
• Circulation 250,000 - 500,000: The Atlantic; Backpacker; New York; Texas Monthly; W
• Circulation 500,000 1,000,000: The Economist; Fast Company; GQ; Runner’s World; Wired
• Circulation 1,000,000 2,000,000:Bon Appétit; Field & Stream; The New Yorker; Popular Science; Vogue
• Circulation over 2,000,000: Martha Stewart Living; National Geographic; Reader’s Digest; Real Simple; Time

Read the full nominees' list.

Magawards deadline is Friday 9th at 5 p.m.

Friday 9th at 5 p.m. is the deadline for entry in the National Magazine Awards. You have been warned.

Wannabe a magawards judge? Here's your chance

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is accepting nominations from the Canadian magazine industry for jury members for the 32^nd annual National Magazine Awards. Individuals interested in judging should send names and a brief description of relevant expertise to NMAF Communication Manager Richard Johnson at staff[at]magazine-awards.com by October 31. The NMAF’s judging guidelines are available online. Each year the NMAF relies on over 200 volunteer judges to evaluate and nominate great Canadian magazine content from across the country. The 32^nd annual NMA gala will be held on June 5, 2009.

More Tackiness at the WMA

At least one tacky joke delivered by a major recipient at the 25th Western Magazine Awards last Friday resulted in boos and catcalls rarely heard at these sedate events, where bad and even tacky jokes are heard every year, and even welcomed, given the legendary tedium of these celebrations.

The tackiness may have been enhanced by the setting of this year’s Gala, which convened outside Vancouver in a so-called Casino Resort on the fringe of the suburban desert. The event was boycotted by several editors, sales people and at least one publisher, none of whom possessed the visas necessary for crossing the Oak Street Bridge. (Hence the lateness of this report.)

For those desperate for recreation after the strain of the ceremony, gambling vouchers (50% off, according to a reliable informant) distributed with dinner enticed the gullible into the casino, where the proprietors were able to recover the rental of the banquet hall that had been waived in order to entice the hapless magazineers into their clutches in the first place.

Those who chose not to gamble were free to plunge into the existential void just outside the front door.

Free and online mags win big at British editors' awards

Sport, a free magazine given away to commuters won the British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) award for launch of the year. And "innovation of the year" went to Dennis Publishing's online only Monkey magazine. This, according to a report in UK Press Gazette, which includes a full list of winners.

What we forget when we forget about magazine awards

As the recent leaf storm of magazine awards fades completely but not quite from memory, I can still (barely) recall observing aloud the day before the so-called gala evening of the National Magazine Awards that cultural magazines can barely afford to participate in these events in a meaningful way—a meaningful way being to enter as many contenders in as many categories as possible—as Maclean’s and The Walrus have demonstrated (once again): if you spend a lot of money you can make the awards “meaningful.”

For the cultural magazines, which can be defined as small-circ magazines whose subsidy derives largely from non-advertising sources, nominations and instances of meaningfulness are few and far between. Every year at Geist we ponder again this question of the money and the enormous amount of time required to complete the application process, and in the end someone (often an idealistic intern who feels that we owe it to our contributors) bites the bullet and arbitrary choices are made and hefty, expensive packages go out to Toronto and Vancouver. And every year we regret having bitten the same cliche yet again. The person to whom I made this observation (at the Mags Canada lunch), I also recall, was a director of the National Magazine Awards and I did not wish to be entirely unfriendly to her cause. “What we need is a separate set of Awards for the cultural mags,” I said to her, in a tone that suggested that I had been pondering this idea for some time. “Call it the Arts and Letters Awards, or something like that. Lower the fees, cut back on the glitz and that ghastly dinner, and move it around from city to city. Let the cultural mags celebrate themselves and award themselves plenty of nominations.” (I quote from memory.)

Plenty of nominations would inject meaning into the event for the small mags, and perhaps even make news. The cultural publishers I know would be happy to participate, especially if they can remember how dreary and expensive and meaningless the last rounds of awards were—not easy to do as we see, because it is in the nature of awards to fade rapidly from memory, leaving behind only a faint trace of regret, to be rekindled once again, and always too late, in the weeks following next year’s awards.