Publishing Plum Goes to Newsweek : Honors: Periodical nabs the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, but the only real buzz focused on the New Yorker’s Tina Brown.

Overcoming publishing’s obsession with the age-old qualities of beauty, health, finance and fame, Newsweek magazine on Wednesday won the 1993 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, beating out other finalists in the category for publications with one million or more circulation: Glamour, Health, Business Week and Vanity Fair.

“From its insightful coverage of the Los Angeles riots to its instant history of the ’92 campaign . . . Newsweek delivers what we need to know with style and substance,” the judges wrote in their citation.

A 27-year tradition, the ceremony of congratulations and catharsis at the Waldorf Astoria hotel brought together an audience of about 1,300, most of whose names appear on the mastheads of magazines big and small--from American Machinist and Automated Manufacturing to Reader’s Digest.

Sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, financially supported by the Magazine Publishers of America, and administered by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, the awards are presented in 11 categories.

Judging for this year’s competition started in March, with a three-day marathon screening. About 130 judges--mainly editors, with a few academics thrown in--met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and culled also-rans from a record 1,371 entries from 328 magazines.

Besides talk about Conde Nast Publications’ purchase of Architectural Digest and subsequent folding on Tuesday of its sister publication HG (formerly House and Garden), the only genuine buzz preceding this relatively staid affair focused on Tina Brown.

Would Brown, who took over the New Yorker six months ago, win in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations of 400,000 to one million, for three issues she oversaw in her first three months there? Would she win the one million and up division, for two issues she edited before leaving Vanity Fair? Or would she take both?

She got neither. (The Atlantic Monthly beat the New Yorker in the lower circulation category.) But the New Yorker did win the fiction category for stories by Alice Munro, Emily Carter and Martin Amis, and in feature writing for “Whose Art Is It?” by Jane Kramer, which explored “a recent clash of racial politics, political correctness and publicly funded art in the South Bronx.”

In any case, it was less exalted editors who exhibited the most excitement at events leading up to the banquet.

Virtually the entire staff of Lingua Franca magazine gathered Tuesday at an ASME cocktail reception. A lively journal about academia, the magazine landed two finalist nominations in spite of a circulation not much bigger than some publishing conglomerates’ staffs: 13,000.

“We’re sort of like the Marisa Tomai entry,” said one ebullient editor, comparing it to the Academy Awards’ best supporting actress, before learning that her publication won the General Excellence award in its circulation division (under 100,000).

Participants do call these copper Alexander Calder-designed awards “the Oscars of the magazine industry.”

The comparison, though, falls short.

Shorter speeches, lower glitz and pretentiousness levels aside--heck, these awards are passed out over a long lunch--it’s the staggering diversity of the magazine medium that makes Oscar analogies irrelevant.

That’s also what makes these awards interesting.

Paul Hoffman, editor-in-chief of Discover magazine, said that a perennial debate developed at the screening sessions: “How does a new publication that can only pay 10 cents a word compete with a big money publication?”

“It always comes down to judging a piece on merit,” he said.

Given how surprisingly small the world of magazines is, with editors jumping from masthead to masthead, making friends and enemies and even marrying each other en route, the potential for back-scratching at judging sessions would seem high.

Judges may not participate in selections in categories in which their publication is nominated, an ASME board member said. And several judges said that they have never seen blatant politicking.

Still, there are skeptics.

In the March Washington Monthly (a past winner of the General Excellence Award), David Segal assailed journalism awards in general, from the Pulitzer to the “I Love an Ethical New York Media Awards Competition.”

But the National Magazine Awards, in particular, vexed him.

The criterion for General Excellence, he said, “is marvelously elastic.” That, he says, explains how back in 1987 People magazine beat out fellow finalists National Geographic and Time with a report on Frank Sinatra’s lives and loves and a 10-year retrospective on Charlie’s Angels.

His broader criticism, however, is that judges tend to be the big men and women on the mastheads, and so, he said, tend to view awards not as way to encourage better journalism, but rather “as an opportunity to congratulate what you might call, in honor of the conglomerate owner of consistent winners, Conde Nastiness--fat, flush, perfumed and perfectly bound pages . . . “

As this year’s awards attested, however, plenty of finalists in various categories are far from fat and perfectly bound.

Sixteen magazines became finalists for the first time: Milwaukee, Print, Prevention, Runner’s World, Skiing, Travel Holiday, Details, Family Therapy Networker, Mac World, American Short Fiction, Health, Child, Hadassah Magazine, YSB (Young Sisters and Brothers), Lingua Franca and Reason.

“We’ve been trying to decide,” Reason editor Virginia Postrel said at the Tuesday cocktail affair, “which is more politically incorrect, our article or American Lawyers’?”

Reason’s entry was an essay by Edith Efron, who went back and reread Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” in light of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” line, she concluded, was not cynical spin-doctoring as many assumed, but likely a sincere response based on his reading of that book in his youth.

American Lawyer’s essay, by Roger Parloff, raised the possibility that, based on the evidence, the first King jury may have reached its verdict untainted by racist bias.

The judges chose American Lawyer. Their citation read in part: “Parloff reviewed the evidence, and, in a powerful and courageous analysis, forced readers to re-examine their assumptions and conclusions. His piece is in the great tradition of a free press that publishes what it believes to be true even when it may go against popular opinion.”

Other winners included:

General Excellence, 100,000 to 400,000: American Photo.

Personal Service: Good Housekeeping.

Special Interests: Philadelphia Magazine.

Reporting: IEEE Spectrum (for “a comprehensive investigation of how Iraq came chillingly close to building an atomic bomb.”)

Public Interest: The Family Therapy Networker (for articles dealing with “the daunting problems and complex solutions of the homeless, drug victims, and the pathology of families among poor people.”)

Design: Harper’s Bazaar.

Photography: Harper’s Bazaar.

Single Topic: Newsweek’s special election issue.

As is the case at the Oscars, many finalists were heard to mutter the “honor to be nominated” cliche. In accepting the New Yorker’s fiction award, Roger Angell said “to 15,000-odd writers whose stories we turn down--sadly, but sometimes, happily--I want to thank you.” Publication, he said, is the biggest honor.

For some, the honor was particularly sweet.

At a reception for finalists, one competitor glanced around the room full of big time editors and gave a metallic grin: “It’s not often in such a large group that I’m the only one with braces,” said Dara Horn, at 16 the contest’s youngest finalist ever.

A high-school sophomore from Short Hills, N. J., Horn wrote in the Zionist Hadassah Magazine (circulation 300,000) about her efforts to understand the Holocaust while visiting Poland and Israel with a group of other teen-agers.

“I wanted to write about it for my high school newspaper, but they didn’t want to put it in. So I’m like, OK,” she said.

“Now I read that in the Fiction category here the finalists are Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, and then I see my name under ‘Essays,’ and I’m like, ‘Wow! Cool!’ ”