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New York Receives National Magazine Awards’ Top Prize

New York magazine took the top honor at the National Magazine Awards on Thursday, receiving magazine of the year for its print and digital coverage.

The annual awards, which are given by the American Society of Magazine Editors, are considered the industry’s most coveted prizes. In giving the award to New York, the judges cited the magazine’s wrenching feature on caring for a dying parent, coverage of what the November election meant for the future and its cover showing Manhattan in dim lights days after Hurricane Sandy.

National Geographic received the highest number of awards with four honors, including best multimedia for its “Cheetahs on the Edge” article, which ran with its November iPad edition, and best tablet magazine. New York, The Atlantic and Texas Monthly each won two awards. New York also received the best magazine section award for its “Strategist” section.

The society gives out general excellence awards in several categories. This year, general excellence in print awards were given to National Geographic, Vogue, Martha Stewart Living, Outside and The Paris Review. The online magazine Pitchfork received the general excellence award for digital media.

National Geographic also won the photography award for its August, September and December issues while the fashion magazine W won the feature photography award for an article on Kate Moss called “Good Kate, Bad Kate” that appeared in its March issue. Saveur’s “Mexico Issue,” which was published in August, won for the best single-topic issue.

The other award recipients were praised for their content and their presentation. The Atlantic won for its Web site as well as for a September article by Ta-Nehisi Coates called “Fear of a Black President.”

Texas Monthly won the public interest award for its August article “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives” by Mimi Swartz about the impact on women since cuts in 2011 to family planning funds. It also won for feature writing for “The Innocent Man,” a two-part article by Pamela Colloff published in November and December about a man accused of murdering his wife.

Stephen King won his second National Magazine Award in the fiction category, for his story “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” which ran in the September issue of Harper’s.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/business/new-york-receives-national-magazine-awards-top-prize.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

SpinMedia Buys Vibe Magazine

SpinMedia, a group of music and pop culture Web sites that includes Spin magazine, has bought Vibe, the 21-year-old RB and hip-hop magazine.

SpinMedia announced the sale on Thursday, saying that it had bought the rights to Vibe’s print magazine as well as to its related sites, Vibe.com and Vibevixen.com, from Vibe Media. The price was not disclosed.

The sale reunites the two publications, which more than a decade ago were part of the same company, Vibe/Spin Ventures, before each title went through a series of sales.

Calling Vibe “an industry leader in the urban and hip-hop category for decades,” Steve Hansen, SpinMedia’s chief executive, added in an interview: “It’s really exciting to add this to SpinMedia’s collection of music properties and bring more digital DNA to the team and see what they can do.”

SpinMedia, until recently known as Buzz Media, owns or represents more than 40 sites like Celebuzz, Idolator and JustJared, that cater to young pop-culture obsessives and compete with a range of sites like Gawker, TMZ, Pitchfork and BuzzFeed.

After it bought Spin last summer, Buzz Media promptly shut down print publication of the magazine and laid off a third of its staff, saying that it would concentrate on the Web site, and consider eventually reviving the print version of Spin in some form. Since then, Spin’s online traffic has doubled, but Mr. Hansen said the company was no closer to reviving the magazine, and that it would probably shut down Vibe’s print magazine later this year.

“We are still trying to find a print model that makes economic sense in the digital age,” he said.

Vibe was founded in 1992 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, with a focus on hip-hop and RB music and the culture surrounding it, and became one of the most influential publications of its kind. It was shut down abruptly in 2009 amid a plunge in advertising revenue, but within months it was bought and revived by private equity investors.

Vibe had an average print circulation of 301,000 for the first six months of 2012, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, and SpinMedia said that each month Vibe’s sites have 1.4 million visitors and serve 1.6 million video streams.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/business/media/spinmedia-buys-vibe-magazine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

New York Receives National Magazine Awards’ Top Prize

SpinMedia Buys Vibe Magazine

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