If his fellow conference-goers are any indicator, Niche Media CEO Jason Binn (right) was just about to embrace someone in this group.

A few lessons learned here at AMC that we didn’t have the time to share with the class yesterday:

– Contrary to the emotional distance you’d assign to them based on long lead times and often imposing corner offices where the desks are the size of many bloggers’ apartments, magazine execs are intensely physically affectionate. We saw enough platonic embracing over pre-dinner drinks (i.e. before folks got loaded) to worry we’d wandered into a cuddle party. Pardon the prudishness — maybe it’s that we’re all bytes and bits as we toil on the virtual chain gang that is the cold-as-ice Internets, where a monthly high-five is about all the contact we can stomach with our closest colleagues.

– Despite the countless service articles on what to bring on business trips you see in virtually every major consumer glossy, editors aren’t necessarily the packing gurus you’d think: We happened upon More EIC Peggy Northrop in our hallway, locked out of her room and awaiting security to let her back in. Somewhat of a captive audience, she informed us, “It’s hot out there — I had to go to the golf shop and get shorts.”

Keep going to see what happens when Hearst Magazines’ president hits the spa…

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Ad Age editor-in-chief Jonah Bloom (right) and publisher Scott Donaton (third from left) recognize the execs behind magazine of the year winner Better Homes & Gardens.

Despite the magazine world’s fixation on moving beyond print (hello, “Magabrand,” whatever you are), it was a senior citizen, 85-year-old Seven Sister stalwart Better Homes & Gardens that scooped up magazine of the year honors from Ad Age, awarded tonight at the American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton.

The awards were presented by Ad Age editor-in-chief Jonah Bloom, who in joking reference to the posh Boca Raton resort playing host to AMC this year, joshed that “the journalists among us are always happy to have a place to moor our yachts — I’ve got the slip next to Keith Kelly.”

Ad Age‘s other honors went to:

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It’s all in the hands: People managing editor Larry Hackett’s (left) questions ranged from expansive to specific, but former White House press secretary Tony Snow’s responses stayed tight throughout.

For an out-of-work White House press secretary, Tony Snow remained remarkably on-message during an interview this evening by People managing editor Larry Hackett at the keynote session that opened the 2007 American Magazine Conference here in Boca Raton, Florida.

In a conversation that lasted just under an hour, including a handful of audience queries that followed a rapidfire stream of questions from Hackett, Snow — who also worked within President George H.W. Bush’s administration as director of speechwriting — held the conversational line just as strongly as he maintained it throughout his stint as press secretary.

A magazine vet who currently heads up corporate communications at a major media conglomerate marveled to us after the interview, “I was fascinated by all the questions to which [Snow] said, ‘I don’t know.’ In communications, you’re supposed to have the answer for everything.” To us, Snow’s question marks made him seem uninformed like a fox. For all the answers Snow could and (perhaps tellingly) couldn’t — and frequently wouldn’t — provide, read on.

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It’s early days (or day, rather) here at Florida’s Boca Raton Resort and Club at the 2007 American Magazine Conference, but immediately upon our rain- and wind-swept entrance into the impossibly pink resort, we witnessed several things that, no matter how distinctive the magazine industry may think it is, ran pretty par for the pre-conference course.

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