NEW YORK - Harper's, New York magazine and the New Yorker each won two National Magazine Awards Tuesday, the highest accolade in the magazine industry. Time and Rolling Stone were also two-time winners.
But perhaps the biggest coup was scored by the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small-circulation literary journal that also won two awards but was nominated for six, even more than the other top-winning magazines.
In addition to the fiction award, the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is based at the University of Virginia, also won for general excellence in its circulation category of under 100,000.
In their citation, the judges said the magazine "reimagines and re-energizes that old-world form - the literary journal," even as magazines rush to adapt to the Internet. "VQR sets the bar extremely high - and clears it time and again."
Time won the award for general excellence among magazines of over 2 million circulation as well as the prize for best single-topic issue for a special 52-page report on Hurricane Katrina, which the judges called a "triumph of the newsmagazine's craft."
Climate change was the subject of two prizes given Tuesday evening. The New Yorker won in the public interest category for a three-part series by Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming, while Rolling Stone won the photo essay award for a 14-page portfolio of remote areas including Antarctica by celebrated photographer Sebastiao Salgado.
The New Yorker also won an award for columns and commentary for three columns by Hendrik Hertzberg, which the judges cited for "rising above the cacophony of competing voices in the punditry-industrial-complex."
Besides Time, other winners for general excellence in their respective circulation categories were: ESPN The Magazine for 1 million to 2 million; Esquire for 500,000 to 1 million; New York magazine for 250,000 to 500,000; and Harper's for the 100,000 to 250,000 category.
Harper's also won for reviews and criticism, while New York also won for design.
In addition to the photo essay category, Rolling Stone also won the reporting award for a story by James Bamford on the Iraq conflict called "The Man Who Sold the War."
The New Yorker remains the all-time biggest winner of the awards with 46; Esquire is next with 18 and Harper's with 15.
The awards are given out by the American Society of Magazine Editors and The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They are often referred to as the "Ellies" after the "Elephant" stabile by Alexander Calder that is the model for the award trophy.
