New Yorker Wins 5 Ellies at Awards Show

David Remnick was clearly the man of the hour. “I’m green with jealousy,” Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner said as he shook the hand of the editor of the New Yorker. The 75-year-old magazine had just won an unprecedented five National Magazine Awards, including one for general excellence in the 400,000-1 million circulation category.

“I know we’ll pay in hell for winning five in one year,” Remnick said after Wednesday’s ceremony, which is often likened to the Oscars for periodicals. The New Yorker’s Ellies, as the prizes are called, total 31, the most in the award’s 36-year history.

Rolling Stone won one award this year, for feature writing. Also awarded prizes for general excellence at the Waldorf-Astoria lunch were Teen People, in the over-1 million circulation category, Mother Jones in the 100,000-400,000 grouping and the American Scholar in under-100,000.

The American Scholar’s Anne Fadiman called her quarterly’s budget “a piece of dental floss” compared with the “shoestring” budget of the Washington Monthly, whose founder and editor, Charles Peters, was inducted into the awards’ Hall of Fame. Rosie O’Donnell introduced the ceremony. The awards are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.