National: Magazine Awards: Scrambled Eggs

Small-fry, independent publishers of titles for the highbrow set, such as "The American Scholar' and "The Oxford American', stole the show from big commercial magazines at the Ellies.
Were it not for News-week's dramatic victory in the Reporting category for its coverage of the president and the intern, it would have been easy to dub 1999 the "Year of the Egg'' in magazinedom. The egghead books reigned: The American Scholar, a quirky intellectual magazine, beat out Esquire, GQ and The New Yorker in Feature Writing. The Oxford American, a Southern cultural magazine owned by novelist John Grisham, won in the category of Single-Topic Issue, knocking out Business Week, Saveur and, again, The New Yorker. Add to that wins by The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's and a victory in photography by Martha Stewart Living (which often runs photos of eggs). u The whispers around the ballroom at New York's Waldorf-Astoria during last week's National Magazine Awards focused mostly on the magazines that were heavily nominated but not awarded. Though Cond Nast boasted two big wins, with Vanity Fair and Cond Nast Traveler each scoring General Excellence awards in their respective categories, the combined brainpower of editor David Remnick and former editor Tina Brown was not enough to win even one sculpted elephant-or "Ellie"-for The New Yorker, despite the magazine's record-breaking eight nominations. Also shut out were Saveur and Esquire, both nominated in three categories.
But as you read this, somewhere, Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman of U.S. News & World Report Inc., is smiling: Zuckerman's Fast Company scored a General Excellence award, and his Atlantic Monthly grabbed an Ellie for Essays & Criticism. Other big winners included Newsweek (which strangely enough became the first newsweekly ever to win in the Reporting category), for being the first to break the Monica Lewinsky story. Good Housekeeping, with Ellen Levine at the helm, earned its third award in the Personal Service category for its special package last October on colon cancer.
The 1999 inductees into ASME's Hall of Fame were Dennis Flanagan, who was editor of The Scientific American for 37 years before retiring in 1984, and Stephen Shepard, editor in chief of Business Week for the past 15 years.
By category, the winners are: General Excellence: Under 100,000 circulation, I.D. magazine; 100,000 to 400,000 circ, Fast Company; 400,000 to 1 million, Cond Nast Traveler; Over 1 million, Vanity Fair. Personal Service: Good Housekeeping. Special Interests: PC Computing for November's "Undocumented Internet Secrets." Reporting: Newsweek, for Feb. 2's "Clinton and the Intern," Feb. 9's "The Secret War" and July 13's "The Tripp Trap?," all by Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas. Feature Writing: The American Scholar for "Exiting Nirvana," by Clara Claiborne Park, Spring. Public Interest: Time for Donald Barlett and James B. Steele's three-part corporate welfare series last November. Design: ESPN The Magazine. Photography: Martha Stewart Living. Fiction: Harper's for "A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga," by Julia Whitty, June; "The Woods at the Back of Our Houses," by Dale Ray Phillips, July; and "The Piano Tuner," by Tim Gautreaux, September. Essays & Criticism: The Atlantic Monthly for July's "Hymn," by Emily Hiestand. Single-Topic Issue: The Oxford American for March/May's "Second Annual Double Issue on Southern Music." General Excellence in New Media: M. Shanken's Cigar Aficionado Online.