The NYT reports that ASME is "adding 12 new categories [to the Magazine Awards] covering online media." But! Rather than present these awards at the already-interminable fancy magazine awards ceremony in May, they "will be handed out at a lunch during a March online magazine conference." At lunch!

In fact, that real magazine awards used to be a modest affair like that, before they started taking that "The Oscars of the Magazine Industry" thing too seriously and inviting random wack people like Jimmy Fallon to present awards (suck it, Jimmy Fallon). Now, the Ellies get to siphon the nerdy, unglamorous online media reporters such as ourselves off into a preliminary affair, saving the real awards ceremony for the Beautiful People. It's genius, really. But what do these categories even mean?

"The Huffington Post, if it defines itself as a magazine, we would accept the entry. If it defines itself as a newspaper, then of course it should enter the Pulitzers," he said.

Haha! But what if it defines itself as the most specialest Magazinemediainternet Thingamajig in the whole wide world? Will there be a special category for that? And what are we supposed to enter? I assume there will be several categories dedicated to fameball coverage? And make sure there's something for Julia Allison!

We're not really winning any awards. But we are going and eating a free lunch, so SCORE. The internet continues to suck the magazine industry dry, one way or another.

You know this year's award ceremony was far more subdued than last year's chocolate fondue-spewing extravaganza which doubtless degenerated into sex orgies in the Conde Nast offices shortly after. But I did notice that there were far fewer ugly people in attendance this year! The key to not getting laid off in the magazine business: for men, a nice suit and one of those fake ass short beards favored in Esquire pictorials; for women, Michelle Obama arms. Maybe actual starvation has replaced eating disorders? Either way, you guys look great!

There were not as many media reporters patrolling the pre-party, because they've been laid off. Sad.

It was all about grim smiles and grim determination! As people filed into the auditorium, the big screen flashing the year's magazine covers kept showing mags that had already died. Every Conde Nastie that got an award felt it necessary to give heartfelt, shiny-eyed thanks to Si Newhouse for his commitment to writing paychecks. They really meant it!

Many of the winners of the actual awards who actually worked in the magazine industry were sitting towards the back, but you know who was sitting right up front? Julia Allison. No shit. That is why the magazine industry is dying.

When the time came for the tribute to Annie Liebovitz, Jann Wenner, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, and Graydon Carter all took the stage to say how much they loved Annie. Something is clearly off with Anna Wintour, who was stooped over like—dare I say—an old lady? Her voice was wavering and kind of meek, and I couldn't tell whether she was sick, or emotional, or just stricken with stage fright. Could be any of the above!

There were plenty of insanely random semi-celebrities lured in to present awards (Steve Earle!) but the only really funny one was Will Arnett. That guy certainly does possess comic timing! The least funny thing: the fact that People editor Larry Hackett got to present the award for "Reporting." WTF. And Columbia J-School dean Nick Lemann is a great writer but he seems to be growing into more and more of a Saturday Night Live character, the longer he spends in academia. Soon he will break out the monocle.

But the most surprising thing of all was that—I must admit—the ceremony was touching. All these people know that their industry is dying, but they soldier on. The delusions are gone. All that is left is the grimness. And the magazine industry will keep hefting its Ellies until they're forced to sell them for scrap.

Magazines!

[Pictured: The glamorous pre-party. Can you count all the glamorous people? Try!]

In summary: Anna Wintour turned oddly sweet at the event; Backpacker.com was a sleeper hit; Field & Stream won a shock upset over the New Yorker; Si Newhouse is a mensch; Reader's Digest the big winner; and everyone loves Annie Leibovitz.

Further highlights from the tweets of Folio, Fishbowl NY, media blogger Rachel Sklar, and media blogger Glynnis MacNicol and NonSociety "lifestreamer" Julia Allison, who took the picture up top, of Jann Wenner, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter).

Winners:

· Reader's Digest for General Excellence (over 2,000,000 circulation)

· Field & Stream for General Excellence (1,000,000 to 2,000,000 circulation)

· Wired for General Excellence (500,000 to 1,000,000 circulation)

· Texas Monthly for General Excellence (250,000 to 500,000 circulation)

· Foreign Policy for General Excellence (100,000 to 250,000 circulation)

· Print for General Excellence (under 100,000 circulation)

· Saveur for Single-topic Issue

· Wired for Magazine Section

· The New York Times Magazine for Reporting

· Bicycling for Public Interest

· Esquire for Feature Writing

· Rolling Stone for Profile Writing

· Backpacker for Essays

· Automobile for Columns and Commentary

· The New Yorker for Reviews and Criticism

· The New Yorker for Fiction

· Esquire for Personal Service

· Esquire for Leisure Interests

· Wired for Design

· GQ for Photography

· National Geographic for Photojournalism

· The New Yorker for Photo Portfolio

· Backpacker.com for General Excellence Online (less than 1 million uniques)

· nymag.com for General Excellence Online (1 million uniques and above)

· Backpacker.com for Personal Service Online

· AARP The Magazine Online for Interactive Feature

Oh, some actual awards are being handed out (congrats Adam Moss, David Granger and Backpacker), but as Hamilton Nolan, who's currently on the scene, said, we think this means we win something, too.

ASME can't really do much to renegade publications, as explained earlier this month in the New York Times. The disciplinary steps are:

• A warning letter.
  
• Withholding a National Magazine Award.
  
• Forbidding a title's participation in the National Magazine Awards.
  
• Suspending an editor's membership.
  
• A really nasty look.
  
• Saying "stop!" a second time.
  
• Brazen taunting.
  
• Jann Wenner critiques the state of your desk each week.
• An internship with Bonnie Fuller.

Obviously, in an advertising depression, certain publications are willing to give up hope of a National Magazine Award in exchange for some much-needed cash. Especially if they never had much hope of getting such an award in the first place.

Us Weekly had every reason to know it was over the line. The celebrity magazine ran a mock cover pimping HBO's Grey Gardens, albeit with a different title font and the word "advertising" across the top. ASME told MediaWeek "advertising cannot obscure the cover in any manner whatsoever," which seems pretty clear.

Entertainment Weekly, part of the esteemed, ethically-concerned Time Inc. empire, got a spanking for turning its cover into "a pocket that contained a pull-out ad for the ABC show The Unusuals," in the words of the Times.

ESPN had a fold-out cover flap touting a pitch on the other side for Powerade.

All three got an ASME reprimand, which is just a warning.

The question now is how long it takes before highbrow titles follow in the footsteps of the celebrity titles. They tend to look to the National Magazine Awards to burnish their upscale positioning. And will ASME will hold to its standards when they do, or just capitulate in the name "economic reality?"

[MediaWeek]

(Pic via MediaWeek)

The New Yorker, as is its wont, got the most nominations (10). This is because The New Yorker is America's best magazine. Next were GQ (8 nominations), New York (6), and Esquire and National Geographic with five each.

Bon Appetit, the NYT mag, and Wired each got four nominations, okay? You can fill in the list of likely suspects who got three or two or even one. In what must be an attempt to help Bon Appetit and Gourmet not fold, ASME bizarrely notes in its press release:

• Food-related magazines, stories and websites captured 12 nominations across nine categories, including General Excellence, Single-topic Issue and Photography

Okay! No huge surprises. You can read the long, long list of nominees here. The award ceremony is on April 20. Last year we went and still ran into Julia Allison, so we may skip 'em this year, unless you, our loyal readers, want us to go, then we will, because we don't need your stupid awards to be happy, ASME, we don't even care that we weren't nominated while Salon.com was. That's fine.

We hear the panel planned simply to disqualify New York, and leave four finalists. It was only a last-minute appeal by one of the judges, Rosemary Ellis of Good Housekeeping, that won Esquire a place. And, yup, Good Housekeeping is part of the same magazine group as Esquire, Hearst. It was a generous gesture by Granger's colleague, and her fellow panel members. Esquire is commercially marginal, and Granger seems to have lost the energy he brought to the magazine a decade ago. Hearst tolerates the situation only as long as Esquire, a magazine with a glorious journalistic history, continues to bring prestige to an otherwise humdrum magazine group. There's not much prestige, however, in a single nomination obtained only by such lobbying.

Beneath the clippings I found a pile of personal letters, all signed by or addressed to Russell. Buried even farther down in the box was a piece of white cardboard with a cartoon sketched on it in colored pencil. The cartoon showed a woman bending over, her buttocks bulky and tinted pink, her labia sagging, as a man with a superfluously large penis penetrated her. "Keep fuckin' it," read the caption. "Hard. Faster. Way up in me. I'm gonna go right now. Oh, you sweet fuckin' son of a bitch."

Georgia Review

By the time Adam Moss came to the podium for the fifth time last night to accept the National Magazine Award for Profile Writing for Vanessa Grigoriadis's piece on fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, some in the audience were muttering that a simple "thank you" would do nicely. But, just as he had for the previous four New York magazine wins, Mr. Moss had a speech ready. "You are never going to give us one again!" he said, and the audience tittered. Perhaps they would, and perhaps they wouldn't!

The award for Profile Writing came after the award for General Excellence in the 250,000 to 500,000 circulation category, in which Mr. Moss beat out a motley assortment of other publications, including demon-child mag Cookie. "Last year I got away with not naming any colleagues personally," he said, reminding the audience that his magazine also went home with awards last year. This year, there was also New York's Magazine Section award for its Strategist section; the award for Design, presented by one of the magazine's founders, Milton Glaser; and the award for Interactive Feature, for the Nymag.com's Fashion Week blog-thing.

Mr. Moss's ultimate boss, the canny money manager Bruce Wasserstein, was also in the audience, and one observer sitting near him reported that he did not so much as crack a smile during the entire ceremony.

It was not lost on anyone in the audience that Mr. Moss had totally beat out David Remnick's New Yorker, which had been nominated for a healthy nine awards but came home with absolutely zero. Still, a certain sense of decorum is to be expected. And thus, when Mark Whitaker, the former editor of Newsweek who is about to start a new job at NBC, quipped on stage that "Adam Moss is the new David Remnick," there was a collective gasp from the audience. Did he really say that? And perhaps more important: Could it be true?

Graydon Carter was decidedly not the new David Remnick. Not with that anecdote about Christopher Hitchens and waxing that he told on stage! Certainly, the words "the back, the crack, the sac" have never been uttered on stage at the National Magazine Awards. However! These are the new National Magazine Awards, held at night for only the second year, at the sleek Jazz at Lincoln Center. Black tie, except Mr. Carter, who wore his trademark double-breasted blue blazer (you know the one, with the gold buttons) and a pair of cerulean blue velvet pants. This is the National Magazine Awards of celebrity guests and presenters, like Kevin Bacon! Scottish singer KT Tunstall opening, but not with the song that was played in The Devil Wears Prada (though no one was sure whether Anna Wintour was actually in attendance). Carrie Fisher! Ann Curry! And videotaped segments by Ellen DeGeneres and America Ferrera!

For as long as anyone could remember, the ceremony had been a lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria, and editors could return to their desks slightly tipsy in the late afternoon. But those days are over! Now individual tickets cost $465, tux rental for the more junior set not included. The editor of the Paris Review, Philip Gourevitch, had bought two tickets, one for himself and one for his managing editor, Radhika Jones—a wise investment, since Mr. Gourevitch's magazine won its first-ever award, for Photojournalism. "I'm going to use it to defend our office," Mr. Gourevitch said afterwards, indicating the Ellie's pointy metal legs. "Tonight, I'm going to go home and let my kid look at it, and hope that no one gets hurt. It's like a throwing star!"

The editor and publisher of McSweeney's, who was there alone (no Dave! No Vendela! No Heidi!), wondered how he was going to get his award, for fiction writing, home to the West Coast. "I don't like to check luggage," he said.

The director John Waters said that he gets 160 magazines a month. His favorite, he said, is the Capital Punishment Newsletter, a magazine that had not been nominated for an award. If he were to start a magazine, he said it would be called Drip, as his last name is Waters, and it would be about "all the worst places to be famous. You know, the embarrassing side of celebrity." —Doree

National Magazine Awards Photo Gallery

National Magazine Awards Winners and Finalists [ASME]

General Excellence. Divided into six circulation categories, this is the big one, known for catapulting little-known magazines (5280, Virginia Quarterly Review) into the limelight and then abandoning them like so many slush pile rejects.

In the under 100,000 circulation category: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, I.D., Metropolis, Print, and Virginia Quarterly Review. VQR took this one home last year, which makes it seem unlikely that the magazine would win again, except that ASME has given this award to Print eight times since 1993—so you know. But we're going to give the nod to Metropolis this time. Urban is in!

In the 100,000 to 250,000 circ category: Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, Philadelphia Magazine, Salt Water Sportsman, and Seed. Both Philadelphia and Mother Jones are kind of throwbacks here, in that they each won a slew of awards in the 1970s and '80s, though their luster has dulled a bit as of late. (Philadelphia hasn't won anything since 1994, though the magazine has been a finalist several times since then; Mother Jones won for General Excellence in 2001.) Although we're tempted to give this one to the darkest horse in the category, Salt Water Sportsman, we're going to go with Foreign Policy, because it's that kind of year. Magazines are serious and discuss serious things!

In the 250,000 to 500,000 circ category: Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, Cookie, New York Magazine, and Texas Monthly. Tough one! Four out of the five nominees are NMA favorites (can you guess which is the odd one out?), and NYM took the award in this category home last year. We're going to bet that it's too early for James Bennet's Atlantic to win, so we're going to give it to Audubon by virtue of its being marginally concerned with environmental issues.

In the 500,000 to 1,000,000 circ category: Condé Nast Traveler, The Economist, Esquire, Gourmet, GQ, and Wired. Six nominees! Crowded! But. Everyone knows that Esquire is absolutely beloved for representing that bygone era of magazine glory. Even though the magazine won this category last year, we're going to say it's going to take it home again—it's also nominated in big-deal categories like Reporting and Feature Writing (twice!), and the not-so-big-deal category of Leisure Interests (Best Bars in America!). Anyway, Esquire, for real.

In the 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 circ category: We've got Entertainment Weekly, Field & Stream, More Magazine, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. Last year this category went to ESPN: The Magazine. We're going to go out on a limb and say that the judges will continue their sports-loving ways and give this one to Field & Stream.

Over 2,000,000 circ category: Glamour, Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic, O, and Time. The Ellies also love Glamour, though last year the magazine got snaked by Time. But it may be too early for Rick Stengel to bring home an award (see also: The Atlantic), so we're going to go back to the tried-and-true. Cindy Leive, come on down!

Some other magazines we think will win: Men's Health for Leisure Interests, for a three-part series called "Your Perfect Summer"; Time for Reporting, for a series of articles about Haditha (the magazine industry cares about Iraq, etc.); Vanity Fair, for William Langewische's "Rules of Engagement," because awards love William Langewische like they love themselves; The New Yorker, for Eric Konigsberg's piece about the genius-kid in Nebraska who killed himself (and now he's writing about society DJs and the Waverly Inn for the NYT); Calvin Trillin for Essays, for the tearjerker "Alice Off the Page," about his dead wife; The Believer for Single-Topic Issue, for the 2006 Music Issue. —Doree

National Magazine Award Finalists [ASME]

We mostly ignored the writing (sorry, Josh). Except for that piece by Greg "My Girlfriend Used to Work There" Lindsay about air travel. Cute! We are living in a tarnished age of air travel!

Anyway, we really just wanted to look at all the pretty pictures. Gosh, they really are pretty! Award-worthy! There's a whole travel portfolio called "Life Observed" (we're thinking "Postcolonial Exoticization and Its Discontents" would've been more appropriate, but whatevs). There's this one of a fisherman holding up a really big fish in Madagascar, and a Mongolian herder (of what, we don't know) sipping something out of a cup, and a man's feet in a red mud quarry, and a billboard in Sri Lanka... And a fashion shoot called "Hell's Angels," of women wearing weird, half-robed dresses and black leather flight caps. And another one called "Bollywood Nights," except they used a black model. Maybe they're trying to say that all brown-ish people look the same. Or that we're all the same under the skin. Or under the wallet?

City Magazine [City]