Magazine Subscriptions Blog

A fun alternative to the National Magazine Awards is the Best 50 Magazines as decided by the Tempo staff at the Chicago Tribune. For the last three years they have been compiling their own list of personal favorites.

They ranked the top 10 as: Blender, National Geographic Traveler, Vanity Fair, Wired, Cook’s Illustrated, New York, People, Vogue, People en Espanol and Metropolis.

What’s really interesting reading is the justification that goes along with each magazine.

You can see the full list of Tempo’s 50 Best Magazines, 2005 at the Chicago Tribune website.

The latest National Magazine Awards were presented in April 2005 – these awards have been around for about 40 years and honor editorial excellence and encourage editorial vitality. The award program is sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in association with the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University.

The selection process is 2-step: firstly entries are reviewed by a judging panel, which recommends a group of finalists; a second judging panel then chooses one winner in each category.

There are a number of Award categories including Leisure Interests, Public Interests, Design, Fiction, Essays, Reporting and even a General Excellence Online Award.

The General Excellence Award is categorized by circulation and this year included such mags as: Glamour, The New Yorker, Wired, Martha Stewart Weddings, Dwell and Print.

You can see the full list of awards at the ASME web site.