The Usual Suspects

Every industry has its peer-reviewed awards competition, especially industries that are fueled mainly by ego and vanity the way the media industry is. There are serious awards and then there are somewhat ridiculous awards,but basically there are enough awards to make sure just about everyone can win something sometime. This has become such a cliche that one can really distinguish oneself these days by at least claiming never to have won an award for anything. This would be an asset for a couple of reasons, not the least of which would be evidence of strength of character, comfort in your own skin, a sort of clarity of vision to recognize that you do not want to belong to the club that would have you for a member.

Still, we cannot bear not to mention that the ASME finalists have been announced. As usual, the New Yorker dominates the field, and this is as it should be. We were especially gratified to see Louis Menand nominated in the commentary and criticism category, less so for Adam Gopnik. We love Adam, but mostly for technical reasons. Menand is just as smart and gifted, but he also happens to be genuinely funny and selfless; those are virtues of age that Gopnik may grow into, if he’s lucky. Other notable nominations: James Woolcott gets a much-deserved nod in the same category, and Ted Genoways—formerly of the Minnesota Historical Society Press—gets TWO count them TWO nominations for his Virginia Quarterly Review! Well done, fella! Notable ecxlusions: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, an unfailingly, jaw-droppingly great art critic, somehow slipped through the cracks, and neither the scrappy, sincere Salon nor the self-evidentally great Slate made the finals in the online category. (To be clear, without inside information, there is no way of knowing whether they even entered, which they’d have to do in order to be nominated as finalists. It is probably better not to ask. Eyes are red and skins are chafed right now.)

Now it is important to note that the “Ellies” (as they are known to us editor-types; they are also known as the national magazine awards) are an essentially credible merit badge worth bragging about, especially among other editor-types. We’re not sure the public cares a whole lot, and if they do, they are not going to be especially surprised that the New Yorker received ten nominations, nor that Vanity Fair received seven, and they certainly aren’t going to think that Vanity Fair must have turned a dramatic corner in the last year, since they were shut out of the nominations last year. (By the way, here is our national magazine award-winning writer—though, of course, she won years ago for her work in the New Yorker, not her work in The Rake, which we have not entered into the competition.)

But here some salient facts that may interest regular folks—and by regular folks, we mean people who are insanely and irrationally obsessed with glossy magazines. Unlike some idiotic magazine awards that are run like college alumni clubs, anyone can enter the national magazine awards. The Awards are juried by members of ASME—that is, the American Society of Magazine Editors. That is, the editors-in-chief whose magazines are competing against one another. Naturally, there are all kinds of personal issues, high levels of favoritism, a certain predisposition to celebrate that which has already been celebrated frequently, a compulsion to look more seriously at the magazines of editors who eat lunch at the Four Seasons, and so on. But there are just enough surprises to keep the whole thing generally on the up-and-up, and these are all basically good people with unimpeachable ethics. Plus, the awards are administered by the Columbia School of Journalism, which puts a very high premium indeed on credibility.

What is the price of vanity? To enter the ASME awards, applicants must submit $400 per entry (that’s for the general excellence category; $200 if you are a member of ASME; membership dues are generally in the range of $200-300 per year). Needless to say, smaller independent publishers find it difficult even to enter the competition—magazines that spend disproportionately on quality editorial content ) are the most disadvantaged of all, because they would benefit the most from national notice, while being the least able to afford the steep entry fee (we’d spend $400 on a page and a half in our magazine, and our writers need the money more than ASME does, probably). If you think about it, it would really be shameful if huge, powerful, intensely profitable companies like Conde Nast DIDN’T monopolize these sorts of awards, even if their editors weren’t favorably judging each other’s titles-—oh, but wait. They surely aren’t allowed to do that, and knowing what we do about the insanely cut-throat culture inside Conde Nast, there is no guarantee that the dogs wouldn’t kill each other if they were caged together.)

The ASMEs are the Oscars for magazines, and that is not saying much, to be sure, but it is what we have. We have wondered for years now why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzers—a cut far above the Ellies in terms of public prestige—when that award is spread from the daily fish wraps, to hardcover books, to freakin stageplays. What’s up with THAT?

Anyway, if if the Ellies have their limitations, they still give us hope each year that there ARE a number of magazine editors (and publishers and writers) out there who DO use their powers for good, even when the whole world is pushing them to be evil.

UPDATE: Because of bad wording that we are too lazy to edit right now, we implied the opposite of what we meant to say out loud somewhere in this little taradiddle: We did, in fact, enter in one category, GE. Alas, we did not escape relegation. If we had, we would not be here talking to you right now, we’d be drinking martinis across the street.