Watching Ellie

mb's editor-in-chief takes in his first National Magazine Awards.

You can read a list of all this year's National Magazine Award winners here.

It makes a lot of sense, in some cosmic way, that the first former colleague I bumped into at the Waldorf-Astoria yesterday was a guy I'll call Ed. Ed has a young daughter named—actually and, for my purposes, perfectly—Ellie, and as we went through our long-time-no-see pleasantries, I learned that Ellie has been having a tough time in elementary school. She's smart and sensitive and artistic and all that, and, as always happens, the leader of the cool girls had therefore decided Ellie would no longer be acceptable to the in crowd. There's nothing, really, to say in response; it's tough for the kid and exasperating for the parents, and it's why everyone hates junior high. "Not that it does any good," I told Ed, "but you could point out to her that the cool kids then are never the interesting grown-ups." Just then we reached the top of the stairs, and we entered the cocktail hour for the National Magazine Awards, where for the next two-and-a-half hours about a thousand former junior-high dorks would try to convince themselves and each other that they are very, very cool.

The Ellies, of course, is the informal name for the National Magazine Awards luncheon, derived from the trophy prizewinners receive, a reproduction of an Alexander Calder stabile that looks like an elephant. It's an echo of the Academy Awards triptych: the Oscars, named for the Oscar, which looks like some long-ago Academy secretary's uncle Oscar. And, for the afternoon, a thousand-odd magazine people, at a ticket price of $275 each, try to pretend that the whole thing is nearly as big a deal as a night at the Shrine Auditorium.

Our version of the red carpet is the 11:30 a.m. cocktail hour, held in a series of chandeliered rooms on the Waldorf's third floor. Everyone's saying hello, but, more importantly, looking around the room for other, more interesting people—perhaps old friends, perhaps former colleagues, perhaps editors far more famous than themselves. Every conversation becomes its own Joan-and-Melissa-Rivers shtick. "Look, it's Mike Kinsley!" "He's looking good." "That's Keith Kelly over there." "Is that Michael Wolff he's talking to?" "Could that be Maer?" "I think I just saw Si."

By 12:15 they've flicked the lights, played some recorded tones, and ushered us all into the grand ballroom, where the coolest kids—i.e., Conde Nasties, newsmag folks, The Atlantic—have their Jack Nicholson spots up front. As we enter, the room is dimmed, with machine-generated fog wafting from the stage, spinning spotlights roaming the floor, and thumping music playing. There's an opening montage—a series of talking-head clips of magazine editors talking about what they do and why the Ellies are so great. (Among the reasons, reports Time honcho Jim Kelly: Because they're really heavy. "I dropped one once, on my foot, and it really hurt," he says, and you can imagine how tough it must be to navigate his office, crammed with the seven Ellies Time has won since the awards were established, in 1966.) Then comes the disembodied voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, editor-in-chief of Family Circle and ASME president Susan Ungaro and editor of Newsweek and ASME vice-president Mark Whitaker!" The two bound to the stage and take up their positions at a pair of podiums, each with its own teleprompter and separated by an enormous TV screen in the middle of the stage, broadcasting the event to the cheap seats, in the balcony. A solitary, standard-sized Ellie sits on a black-satin platform at mid-stage, dwarfed below the enormous TV screen.

For each award category, there's a video introduction with a series of panning, Ken Burnsish shots of the nominated mag, jazzy background music, and predictably goofy introductory language. JD Jungle, one of the nominees for general excellence under 100,000 circulation, is meaninglessly described as both "clever and irreverent, but ultimately serious." ESPN The Magazine is—har har—"on top of its game." Awards shows always feature such blather, but it's much more painful when what's being honored is good writing.

Regardless of what a magazine is nominated for, it’s the book's top editor who goes onstage and collects the prize. Things start off well—which is to say amusingly—when National Geographic Adventure wins the first award, for a leisure-interest story, and editor-in-chief John Rasmus reads excerpts of emails between the writer and editor of the winning piece. "Oh, I get it—don't make the editor look like a fool, make the writer look a like a fool," is one representative complaint, and the crowd laughs. It's nice to know even these top-flight pieces are created just as agonizingly as standard-fare magazine writing. Two awards later, the Ellie for essays is won by The American Scholar, whose editor, Anne Fadiman, quotes Montaigne, eliciting a slight groan. Next up is design, which goes to Details; a whoop arises from the Conde Nast section—or was that just the Details table?—when the award is announced. In recent months, the sexual orientation of Details has been debated nearly as much as Tom Cruise's, so it's curious when editor-in-chief Dan Peres, who everyone agrees is straight, lastly thanks "my partner, Bill Wackerman." Eyebrows rise at my table, and I'm sure elsewhere, but it turns out Wackerman is the mag's publisher and Peres meant "partner" only in the professional sense.

Sports Illustrated wins next, for profile writing, and Time Inc.'s collective cheer doesn't rival Conde Nast's a moment ago. Managing editor Terry McDonell, who used to edit Us Weekly, accepts the award, and, as you take in his Rumsfeld-chic look—gruff manner, ramrod-straight posture, thinning, slicked-back hair—you can't help but think, this guy used to edit Us Weekly? But when The Atlantic wins for public interest and managing editor Cullen Murphy goes up to the stage in navy blazer, blue button-down Oxford, and khakis, with a sandy forelock tumbling onto his face, it's gratifying to see that he looks exactly like what you'd expect someone named Cullen Murphy to look like. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, who picks up the magazine's award for feature writing, also looks pleasingly the way he should: dapper, bemused, and elegantly, unseasonably tanned. Architectural Record editor-in-chief Robert Ivy, who collects his magazine's prize for general excellence, 100,000-250,000 circulation, will clearly be played by character actor Steven Tobolowsky in Ellies: The Movie.

There are several tributes throughout the event to Michael Kelly, who had edited The Atlantic, National Journal, and The New Republic, and had written for The New Yorker, and who was the first American reporter killed while embedding with troops in Iraq. "What a pip," was his reaction to news of The Atlantic's Ellie nominations, Cullen Murphy reports, and it's easy to see how the whole afternoon would have been a pip to him. (The Atlantic won the award for general excellence, 500,000 to 1 million circulation, and it's an even greater tribute to Kelly's reinvigoration of the magazine that the judges had voted before his death.) Every winning editor is smart enough to thank the man who signs his checks—Si Newhouse's ring is kissed throughout the affair—but only Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, receiving the Ellie for general excellence, 250,000 to 500,000 circulation, thinks to congratulate his fellow nominees and thank his copy editors and fact checkers. Unlike at the Oscars, no one thanks God, parents, or Harvey Weinstein.

The Best Picture award of the day is the Ellie for general excellence, circulation over 2 million. I'd spent a few days explaining to friends and colleagues that the Ellies are boring because the general-excellence awards are broken up by circ—you'll never be surprised to see an indie beat out the blockbusters because here each contender for the big award is already a big-name, plausible winner. So I was doubly surprised by Parenting's upset win; its competitors—stalwarts like National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and O, The Oprah Magazine—are far more recognizable names. The other big upset was The New Yorker's win for reporting. Jeffrey Goldberg's two-part article on Hezbollah, which brought Remnick & Co. their first Ellie of the day, was a great piece, but William Langeweische's three-parter on the "unbuilding" of the World Trade Center, for which The Atlantic was nominated, was even better. More disconcerting was the possibility that Langeweische's loss would be interpreted as a victory for Stephen Jay Gould's crazy widow.

Soon it's over, less than two hours after lunch was served (your company's $275—which, I should acknowledge, I artfully but legally finagled mediabistro's way out of paying—bought only a piece of cold halibut over asparagus and lentils followed by a "goblet" of moussy dessert). We've been important and cool for a while, but we've got offices to get back to and deadlines to meet. Even so, out in the sunlight, we're still a little puffed up. In 20 years or so, maybe Ed's little Ellie can come to the Ellies, where she'll take her proud place among all the other former grade-school misfits, who realize life didn't turn out so bad.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.