We were a little sad that our old friend Ted Genoways (Virgina Quarterly Review) didn’t manage to pull off an upset and bring home a National Magazine Award yesterday, after being nominated in two categories. Likewise, the upstarts at 5820 did not win—but these small, passionate puiblications can certainly make plenty of hay out of their finalist status.
In today’s Washington Post, Peter Carlson yawned at the results of the NMAs. He notes that watching the New Yorker win five awards reminds him of the 1927 New York Yankees. We have two thoughts about the New Yorker’s success. First, it’s vaguely possible that there really are no other magazines doing the sort of quality work that the New Yorker does, and it is certainly true that there are no magazines that use better writers. The New Yorker really is the Yankees of the magazine world, in the sense that anyone who is at the absolute top of their craft will eventually find a way into the magazine. The brand is thus self-sustaining. (Downside of this is that it is left to other magazines like, say, the National Journal and Mother Jones and Virginia Quarterly to find and publish the next generation of New Yorker writers.) Second, the New Yorker’s success among its peers is probably a positive sign that editors everywhere (or at least the editors who jury the NMA’s) still have old-fashioned values about what constitutes good, quality magazine journalism. (Downside of this is that most editors are presumably frustrated non-Yankees who wish they had the freedom to look less like Lucky and more like the New Yorker.)
Mildly related note, before getting back to the bottle-washing room: We’ve finally got around to reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful little book, “The Fishes Eye,” a collection of his essays about fishing and fishing-related subjects. We’ve always enjoyed Frazier’s work, and can’t think why he doesn’t immediately spring to our lips when people ask who we like best in the world of writing. Frazier has won a fistful of NME’s himself, most recently for a wonderful piece published in Outside magazine about… ice. Yes, frozen water. That article actually made the anthology of NME winners that ASME publishes each year—one of those books we tend to avoid on some vague principle of avoiding industrial antholigies.
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