Smaller mag publishers are big Ellie winners
S MALL,
offbeat magazines dominated the industry’s annual awards competition on Tuesday, beating back their better-known, better-financed rivals.
In category after category, it was editors and brass from Time Inc., Hearst and Meredith standing to applaud folks from Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, Good Magazine, Eater and Modern Farmer as they picked up their Ellie for excellence in magazine publishing.
Mother Jones won for reporting for Shane Bauer’s “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard.” Sarah Gray Miller, editor-in-chief of Modern Farmer, won for general excellence, special interest, and Pacific Standard won for photography.
“It was the year of the underground, radical subversive magazine,” GQ Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson said following the afternoon event as he went home without any hardware despite four nominations. “Good for them, they’re part of the resistance.”
The National Magazine Awards, which was hosted by “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt, was one of the rare awards shows in that it contained very few political speeches.
Industry stalwarts didn’t go home empty-handed.
New York magazine Editor-inChief Adam Moss padded his alltime win total to 37 after picking up three Ellies — for magazine section, video and single topic issue — while the New York Times Magazine won for feature writing, essays & criticism, and public interest.
In a year in which many of the serious magazines misplayed the presidential race, it cleared the way for a sports title, ESPN The Magazine, helmed by its first female editor, Alison Overholt, to win in the prestigious news, sports and entertainment category — beating out GQ , Bloomberg Businessweek, New York magazine and the New Yorker.
Condé Nast, which can usually count on at least David Remnick and The New Yorker taking home some hardware, managed only one win — and it went to Adam Rapoport and Bon Appétit for general excellence in service and lifestyle.
Pacific Standard Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Jackson, took a while to reach the dais to pick up his Ellie for photography. “They put me back at the losers table,” Jackson quipped. “I didn’t think I had any chance . . . holy s--t.”
Modern Farmer’s Gray Miller said, “At the risk of sounding repetitive, holy s--t.” She wasted no time in thanking her full-time staff — all four of them — before adding a serious note, “Half the farm workers in America are undocumented Mexican immigrants.”
Huffington Post’s Highline won in the Multimedia category for, “The 21st Century Gold Rush,” by Malia Politizer and Emily Kassie a piece on refugees.
Good Magazine won with one of the few tied directly to the election, picking up an Ellie in the personal service category.
The winning article, which was on how to survive a Donald Trump presidency, was entitled, “What Can He Really Do? What can we do about it?”
Editor-in-Chief Nancy Miller said the quarterly was all set to go with a different cover package when election results came in during the wee hours of Nov. 9. “We’re a quarterly and the staff reacted like a weekly. We busted on it and kicked ass.”
Bill Keller, the one-time NYT executive editor now running The Marshall Project, an online publication backed by ex-Wall Streeter Neil Barsky, won general excellence for literature, science and politics.
Magazine of the Year winner, Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief at Mother Jones, said as she closed the show, “The media is under attack, and whether you’re a news and politics magazine or an entertain and distract magazine, we need both. I hope we all stick together.”
Min gossip
The future of Janice Min — and what really went down as she stepped down on Monday as president of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard — was one of the big- gest topics of table gossip at the National Magazine Awards event.
The rumor mill has always said that Condé Nast has long eyed her as a potential editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair if longtime incumbent Graydon Carter ever decides to step down.
Carter seems newly energized by his long-running feud with President Trump.
On the THR/Billboard Media Group front, the speculation is that owner Todd Boehly, whose Eldridge Industries spun the titles out of Guggenheim Media in December 2015, is interested in selling but needed to move some of Min’s seven-figure salary off the books.
Officially, she is helping Eldridge and Boehly look for acquisitions.
But the whisper is that they are just paying out her contract at the parent company. There is also speculation that Hollywood executives — who got to know her abilities first-hand as she covered the town — may offer her some sort of studio job.
Min could not be reached for comment.