Since 2000, the American Society of Magazine Editors has gathered together some of the finest journalism of the previous year in Best American Magazine Writing. Each of the stories in this edition was chosen by the judges of the National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media as a finalist or winner in one of five categories: Reporting, Feature Writing, Essays and Criticism, Columns and Commentary, and Public Interest (the only outlier is Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” one of three short stories entered by The New Yorker in the competition for the 2018 ASME Award for Fiction).
Why these five categories? In 2018, ASME awarded National Magazine Awards in twenty categories, ranging from Design and Photography to Social Media and Digital Innovation. Each of the finalists and winners in these latter categories is well worth the attention of every magazine reader, but as the names of these categories suggest, it would be impossible to present them here. Nonetheless, they are reminders that magazines today, whether published in print or online, are more than paper and ink.
When the National Magazine Awards were established in the early 1960s, there was of course only paper and ink. The winners of those early awards—publications such as Look and Life, stories such as Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Grace Paley’s “Enormous Changes at the Last Moment”—are now part of the proud history of American magazines. But history was not what the members of ASME had in mind when they first partnered with the Columbia Journalism School to found the National Magazine Awards. ASME’s intention was to win for magazines the same kind of recognition the Pulitzer Prizes had brought to newspapers.
Five decades later the once-sharp distinction between magazine journalism and much of what you read in newspapers has largely blurred. Alison Overholt’s introduction to this edition of Best American Magazine Writing explains what happened. As competition for the attention of the reader grew—driven first by television, now by smartphones—print and electronic media of every kind adopted magazine storytelling as their own.
The results of the 2018 National Magazine Awards and Pulitzer Prizes prove the point. Two of this year’s National Magazine Award winners—Ronan Farrow’s reporting for The New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual abuse and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s story for GQ “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof”—also won Pulitzer Prizes. The work of another Pulitzer Prize winner, New York’s Jerry Saltz, received a National Magazine Award in 2015.
When the first National Magazine Award was presented to Look in 1966, there was only one award and a handful of judges (all men, all besuited). Today ASME sponsors not only the National Magazine Awards and the ASME Award for Fiction but also the ASME Best Cover Contest and the ASME Next Awards for Journalists Under Thirty. And there are dozens of judges, editors, and educators, men and women, representing every kind of magazine—from large-circulation consumer magazines headquartered in New York, San Francisco, Des Moines, and Birmingham to city and regional magazines scattered across the country.
One more history lesson: In 1970, the first four winners of the National Magazine Award—Life, Newsweek, and American Machinist along with Look—purchased Alexander Calder’s stabile Elephant from the artist and presented it to ASME to be used, with Calder’s permission, as the symbol of the awards. Since then every National Magazine Award winner has received a copper “Ellie,” modeled on the original. Which is why the National Magazine Awards are called the Ellies, at least by ASME members.
This year 281 publications submitted 1,368 Ellie entries. There were, to be precise, 269 judges, who, after hours of preliminary reading and two days of debate at Columbia University, chose five to seven finalists in each category. Fifty-eight media organizations were nominated overall. Twenty-one titles received multiple nominations, led by New York with ten and The New Yorker with eight. New York and The New Yorker also won the most awards—three each—followed by GQ with two. For more information about the judges, the finalists, and the winners, please visit the ASME website at http://
Hundreds of magazine journalists make the Ellies possible: the editors in chief who choose to enter the awards; the assistant, associate, and senior editors who decipher the annual call for entries and then organize sometimes dozens of submissions; the judges, many of whom take time out over the year-end holidays to read entries, then fly to New York in January to spend those two days of debate in often cramped, overheated classrooms, reading still more entries; the reporters, photographers, story editors, and art directors whose work only occasionally receives the kind of recognition it deserves, even at the Ellies. Gratitude is due to each of them.
The sixteen members of the ASME board of directors are responsible for overseeing the administration, judging, and presentation of the Ellie Awards. You can find their names on the mastheads of your favorite print and digital magazines—and on the ASME website. Most of all, I want to thank Christopher Keyes, the editor in chief of Outside, who as president of the board is largely responsible for the success of the Ellies. In addition, I must acknowledge the work of Nina Fortuna, the director of ASME, who every year sets aside the demands of friends, family, and Maltese to make the Ellies happen.
I also want to thank CNN’s Don Lemon for hosting the awards presentation this year—and for bringing his mother, Katherine Clark, to cheer on every finalist and winner.
ASME has cosponsored the National Magazine Awards with the Columbia Journalism School for more than half a century. The members of ASME wish to thank Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who now serves as the dean of the journalism school, for his continuing support of the Ellies. Thanks also to Abi Wright, the executive director of professional prizes at Columbia, for her help in organizing the Ellies judging and for her invaluable service as a member of the National Magazine Awards Board.
David McCormick of McCormick Literary has long represented ASME as its agent. The members of ASME are truly appreciative of his work on our behalf. The editors of Best American Magazine Writing at the Columbia University Press are Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell. Philip’s enthusiasm not only for the work represented in this book but also for every Ellie winner is an annual source of inspiration. And without Michael’s skill and determination, I am afraid this book would never make it to the printer—at least on time.
In closing, I want to thank Alison Overholt, the editor in chief of ESPN the Magazine, for stealing time from the World Cup to write the introduction of BAMW 2018. And finally, I want to offer ASME’s thanks to the writers who graciously consented to the publication of their work in Best American Magazine Writing. You can find their names in the table of contents and at the beginning of every story in this book. All they get from ASME is a certificate of recognition. From readers, they get more—time, attention and loyalty.