Time Magazine Generously Shares National Magazine Award

"I feel like when we win, everybody wins," said Time managing editor Rick Stengel in a ballroom at the New York Marriott Marquis Thursday night, accepting a National Magazine Award for magazine of the year, the evening's top honor.

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Of course, everybody did not win.

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A few minutes earlier, a server had brought a round of beers over to a table where the staff of Vice was sitting. They took sips as the finalists were announced in the penultimate category of general excellence for general-interest magazines, letting out a hearty cheer as their title, an unlikely first-time nominee, was rattled off.

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But the celebration was short-lived: The award went to Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Upon receiving one of the so-called "Ellie" statues that are the magazine industry's highest award, Josh Tyrangiel, Businessweek's editor, reminded the hundreds in attendance just how far the drastically revamped magazine had come since his name landed on the top of its masthead in 2009.

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"Two-and-a-half years ago, this magazine was basically a death story," he said, thanking New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and several other top executives from the mayor's eponymous media company, for swooping in and bringing it back to life.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Tyrangiel's remarks were that they were happening before 10 p.m.

A year earlier, the 2011 Ellies ceremony infamously dragged on until around midnight, and the room felt a little comatose by the end.

So the awards' organizers, the American Society of Magazine Editors and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, had promised attendees that this year's proceedings would stay on schedule, with a 60-second cap on acceptance speeches and instructions to emcee Brian Williams to keep things moving along.

"If you're gonna thank people, just thank a few of them," the NBC News anchor pleaded. (His sarcastic rejoinders turned out to be one of the highlights of the event.)

The National Magazine Awards are a civilized affair, dominated by the decorum of the city's most august magazines. So while it was a bit disappointing not to see what the kids from Vice might have done on stage for an awards speech, there was one welcome break when Tim Rogers, the editor of Dallas's local D Magazine, darted up to the podium to accept the award for profile writing, a category in which the monthly had bested industry darlings Men's Journal, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and ESPN.

Rogers, who from afar looked a little like the actor Jason Lee, forewent the usual thank-yous in favor of a rambling discourse on how magazine writers only do it to get laid, and something about how 16 years ago, he had proposed to his wife, who was sitting at D Magazine's table near the back.

"Tonight, with a little bit of luck, a little bit of red wine, and this award, I'm gonna get lucky," he said, getting to the point. (UPDATE: He later wrote a blog post about what he meant for his speech to be.)

There were some other moments, albeit not quite as memorable, that also broke-up the monotony. Earlier, New Yorker editor David Remnick had revealed his familiarity with the canon of late R&B singer Aaliyah by evoking one of her hit songs while accepting an Ellie on behalf of young, twenty-something reporter Sarah Stillman, whose June 2011 piece about foreign workers who staff American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan won for public interest.

"Age ain't nothin' but a number," said Remnick.

(The fact that Stillman is a woman may have served to temper some of the criticism that clouded this year's predominantly male crop of finalists.)

The New Yorker, a perennial Ellies champ, snagged the award for reporting, too. New York editor Adam Moss, meanwhile, now has three more Ellies to add to his vast collection.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter paid tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens, whose trio of columns gave the magazine a win for commentary.

"Christopher Hitchens was not just a brilliant journalist and thinker. He really was the beau idéal of the public intellectual," said Carter, adapting some of the remarks he'd given at a memorial service for Hitchens a few weeks earlier. "He was also one of the bravest men I have ever known. ... I know I will not see someone like him for a long time."

Terry McDonnell, editor of Sports Illustrated (and former editor of every other magazine that has ever existed), was humble and eloquent when he spoke regarding his induction into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.

Looking stockier and grayer than he did in the video montage that had played before his speech, McDonnell said: "I think that being an editor right now is the most interesting time to be an editor because of all the possibilities that are coming. When the challenge is basically, 'change, or go home,' my response to that is, no fear. Bring it.

"I really like this work. I really like your work," he continued. "I like how it's fluid, and I like how it's nuanced, and I like how it's ironic, and I like how it has so much craft in it, and it has its own tides, it's own seasons, and it has bogeymen, and maybe it even has magic sometimes when it all comes together. ... I think all of you know all of that, and you like that, too. And that's why I think you all understand how very very much this honor, and that's the right word, means to me. And I like that most of all."

You can view the full list of this year's National Magazine Award winners below.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article described D Magazine editor Tim Rogers as tall, but apparently my eyesight was not at its best last night: His colleagues in Dallas know better.