Small, off-beat 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 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, 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 Adam Moss padded his all-time win total to 37 after picking up three Ellies, as the awards are known — 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 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 Rappoport and Bon Appétit for general excellence in service and lifestyle.
Pacific Standard’s editor 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***.”
Sarah Gray Miller, editor in chief of Modern Farmer, said, “At the risk of sounding repetitive, holy s***.” 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 Highline won in the Multimedia category for, “The 21st Century Gold Rush,” by Malia Politizer and Emily Kassie for 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, 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 Jones 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.”
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