IMPORTANT NEWS ABOUT THE 2010 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS
Last week at the ASME/MPA Innovation Summit, the president of ASME, David Willey, announced significant changes in the National Magazine Awards. These changes were approved by the ASME Board of Directors at its meeting on September 23, 2009. For those who may have missed the coverage of the changes in the New York Times and elsewhere, here is a summary.
The 2010 National Magazine Awards will expand to include 12 categories for digital media. These new awards—the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media—will be presented at a midday event in March in New York.
The National Magazine Awards will also introduce another new category this year: Magazine of the Year. This award, to be presented at the evening gala in April, will honor publications for their accomplishments both in print and online.
Category descriptions for the new awards as well as the traditional awards are now available here. The Call for Entries for the 2010 National Magazine will be posted online on Tuesday, November 2, 2009, and hard copies will be mailed to chief editors immediately thereafter. The Call for Entries will also describe major changes in submission procedures, including online entry.
ASME decided to expand the National Magazine Awards for the simple reason that the awards no longer reflected what magazines are—and perhaps more importantly, will be.
Since 1997 the awards have honored what was initially called new media; two years ago the awards opened such categories as Reporting and Feature Writing to magazine websites and online-only magazines. Yet many of the tools editors use to tell stories and serve readers online are very different from the tools they use in print. For the National Magazine Awards to tell the full story about magazine journalism and magazine making, new categories that did not overlap with the traditional awards were required.
The new categories were formulated by a committee composed of editorial leaders from major publishing groups and independent publications and chaired by Jim Meigs of Popular Mechanics. The committee was charged with establishing awards that would honor online magazine content and editorial practices, not distribution platforms.
The new National Magazine Awards for Digital Media include the following categories: General Excellence, Digital Media; Mobile Media; Design, Digital Media; Photography, Digital Media; News Reporting; Blogging; Regular Department or Section; Multimedia Feature or Package; Interactive Tool; Podcasting; Video; and Community.
With the addition of the new awards, the National Magazine Awards now includes 35 categories: 14 print-only categories (among them, 6 General Excellence categories); 8 categories in which pieces that originally appeared either in print or online are eligible; and 12 digital-only categories. Category 35 is Magazine of the Year.
As noted, the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media will be presented at a midday event in late March. ASME believes that these new awards deserve their own celebration, where they will not be overshadowed by already established awards. Scheduled to take place in conjunction with the MPA 24/7 Digital Conference, the Digital Ellies lunch will also demonstrate the growing strength of the magazine business online. (For those of you who participated in the MPA Digital Awards in the past, the MPA has ended that program, underscoring its support of the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media.)
The other new award this year is, of course, Magazine of the Year. The description of this award in the Call for Entries reads in part: “This category honors magazines that are superior both in print and online. . . . Publications honored in this category are those that combine or integrate print and digital media most successfully in fulfilling the editorial mission of the magazine.” This new award will help us honor the best of our craft while pointing the way to the future.
ASME believes that these changes in the National Magazine Awards will further the mission of the awards: to honor editorial excellence, affirm the enduring power of print and celebrate the vibrant reality of magazines online.
To see the category descriptions for the 2010 National Magazine Awards, click here.
