The American Society of Magazine Editors was founded fifty years ago, in September 1963. From the beginning, one of ASME’s goals—really, its main goal—was to establish the National Magazine Awards. It didn’t take long to get things going. ASME and its cosponsor, the Columbia Journalism School, presented the first National Magazine Award to Look magazine in 1966 for work published in 1965 (which is something you may want to remember as you read this book—it’s the 2013 National Magazine Awards for stories published in 2012), along with Certificates of Special Recognition to Ebony, The New Yorker (for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), and Scientific American.
Since that first award was presented (1966 was the year John Lennon said the Beatles were “more popular then Jesus now”—which presumably had nothing to do with the publication of Time magazine’s “Is God Dead?” cover one month later), the National Magazine Awards have grown far beyond what the founders of ASME could have expected. There were fewer than one hundred entries in those early years and a handful of judges (based on the photographic evidence, they were generally tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking men except for one or two shirtdress-wearing, cigarette-smoking women).
Nowadays there are thousands of entries and hundreds of judges—330 this year—and an addiction to tobacco products has been replaced by a fixation on tiny screens. But the quality of the work endures. In fact, as James Bennet suggests in his introduction to this anthology, at a time when the relevance of magazine media is sometimes questioned, magazine journalism has never been better, and the enthusiasm readers show for it has never been greater. That goes not only for the kinds of long-form stories collected in this latest iteration of Best American Magazine Writing but also for the service journalism, celebrity profiles, fashion photography, graphic design, websites, and tablet editions that the members of ASME also celebrate when they gather every year at the National Magazine Awards Dinner in May to find out who won what.
Months before that happens, though, magazines by the truckload begin to arrive at the ASME offices for eventual distribution to the judges. This year nearly 260 publications entered the National Magazine Awards, submitting 1,636 entries in 24 categories, including 5 categories for digital content. The magazines that enter the awards every year range from literary journals that count their readers in the thousands to mass-market publications with audiences numbering in the tens of millions.
The judges are an equally diverse lot. Most work in New York for major publishers, but a quarter of the judges live and work outside the metropolitan area, many at smaller regional magazines. The majority are editors, some are writers, but there are also dozens of art directors and photography editors as well as journalism educators from around the country. What they all have in common is patience and dedication, at least when it comes to the National Magazine Awards. They have to, since each judge has to read hundreds of pages in preparation for the judging then sit in sometimes cramped conference rooms in downtown Manhattan for hours of deliberation before choosing finalists and winners.
The judges pick five finalists in most categories—seven in some with an especially large number of entries, such as Reporting and Feature Writing—then they pick the winner. It is those finalists and winners that are represented in this volume. And what do the winners get? A reproduction of Alexander Calder’s stabile “Elephant” (which is the reason the National Magazine Awards are sometimes called Ellies, though a lot of editors just call them the ASMEs). These miniature mastodons are distributed at the aforementioned dinner, which this year was attended by 600 editors and publishers and hosted by Willie Geist of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and NBC’s Today.
Many of the winners and finalists are inside this book. Not all of them, of course—there’s no way to include every piece. And some of them just won’t fit, like
Mother Jones magazine’s election-changing “Full Secret Video of Private Romney Fundraiser,” a.k.a. “the 47-percent video” (proving, as the judges said, the enduring influence of magazines, whether in print or digital form). You can watch it on YouTube along with the rest of the dinner. To find out more, visit
magazine.org/asme to see the categories, finalists, winners, and judges for this year’s awards. There’s also a searchable database of past finalists and winners—a guide to a half century of extraordinary journalism.
The success of the awards depends on the judges—for their commitment and, of course, their impartiality—but the administration of the National Magazine Awards, including the judging and the dinner, is overseen by the ASME board of directors. ASME members are thankful for the hard work of both the judges and the board. Special thanks are due to the president of ASME, Lucy Schulte Danziger, the editor in chief of Self, for her selfless enthusiasm and electrifying energy.
The Columbia School of Journalism still sponsors the National Magazine Awards with ASME. I want to thank the dean of the school and Henry R. Luce Professor, Nicholas Lemann—who is leaving Columbia after a decade—and the associate dean of programs and prizes, Arlene Notoro Morgan, for their contributions to the awards.
I am especially grateful to James Bennet, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, for writing the introduction to this edition of Best American Magazine Writing. Congratulations are in order as well—The Atlantic won two National Magazine Awards this year, for Essays and Criticism (the piece opens this book) and Website (another winner that won’t fit in this volume). It’s also worth pointing out that The Atlantic is the most honored monthly in the history of the awards.
The members of ASME are thankful to our agent, David McCormick of McCormick & Williams, for his skillful representation of our interests. As always, I am thankful for the talent and enthusiasm of our editors at the Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell.
On behalf of ASME, I want to thank our colleagues at MPA—the Association of Magazine Media, especially the chair of the board of directors, Michael Clinton of Hearst Magazines. I also want to thank Mary G. Berner, the president and CEO of MPA, as well as Cristina Dinozo, Sarah Hansen, Caitlin Cheney, John De-Francesco and, of course, ASME’s Nina Fortuna, whose hard work and common sense make the National Magazine Awards go.
And finally, ASME thanks the writers, editors, and magazines that permitted their stories to be published in Best American Magazine Writing 2013. Whatever you call what they do—long-form journalism, narrative journalism, literary journalism—there can be little doubt that we owe them more than thanks for their work.