The best part about the National Magazine Awards handed out by the American Society of Magazine Editors is the way it pits friendly rivals against one another.
Joanna Coles, in winning the first-ever NMA for Cosmopolitan last Thursday, also delivered the best acceptance speech line of the night.
“Some of you may not know this, but at Cosmo we have a sex position called the ASME,” she told the crowd at the Mariott Marquis. “It involves bending over, holding your ankles and enjoying some slow digital input.”
Cosmo’s arch-rival Glamour did not win one for print, but did win a category that many publishers are racing to capitalize on as the new revenue stream for the future: video.
Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive accepted the award for a video on Glamour.com in which Caitlin Brodnick invited cameras into her home and hospital to document her decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy when it was revealed that she had a gene that greatly increased her odds of contracting breast cancer.
Leive confided that Glamour.com had only just launched its video series weeks before the three-part series began. “This is for you,” she said, dedicating it to Brodnick.
While the awards were stretched to 24 categories because of combining the digital and print awards on the same night, only one person was given the gong — in the form of stage music — for going overtime. That was Field and Stream Editor Anthony Licata. “Well, I was way back at table 51 — it took me a long time to get up there,” he said.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” were the co-hosts and did a good job moving the show along. The longest speech of the night was ex-Time Editor Jim Kelly telling how his friend Graydon Carter had great passion for everything — even when it came to buying used cars: “It was always the best used car. Until he bought the next one. Then that was the best used car ever.”
Then Carter — part-owner of three restaurants and known to enjoy the finer things in life — was quick to correct the record that he was not rattling around in old clunkers. “For those of you who are collectors, they are known as vintage cars,” he said.