The American Society of Magazine Editors announced nominations for their annual National Magazine Awards last week, and for the first time included a brand new category: Magazine of the year. The official press release from the Magazine Publishers of America, defines the new award as, "honor(ing) publications that successfully use both print and digital media in fulfilling the editorial mission of the magazine." Let's take a look at the first time honorees: The Atlantic; Fast Company; Glamour; Men’s Health; and New York. (more...)

Anyone suffering from the illusion that the Atlantic wields any control at all over what its writers write, need not suffer any longer! Headline blogger Andrew Sullivan (who left Time for The Atantic just over three years ago) is really not at all happy with last week's redesign of the Atlantic's powerhouse website and is making his dislike known. Really known. Behold. (more...)

After releasing a pretty inclusive list of the Top 25 Right-Wing Journalists in America, Daily Beast columnist Tunku Varadarajan took on the other half of the aisle, putting together a list of the most powerful and influential American liberals. In many ways, The Top 25 Left-Wing Journalists list is much more eclectic than it's conservative counterpart, and includes a much larger number of personalities that toe the line between entertainers/commentators and journalists-- many, in fact, that are solidly in the entertainment or commentary camp. (more...)

Last Monday, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a piece on Andrew Sullivan, staff writer at The Atlantic, maître d' of The Daily Dish, and all-around nabob of web journalism. It was not a very nice piece. Indeed, leaving aside, for the time being, the charmlessness of Wieseltier’s prose (“I tried to read it . . .,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sullivan’s colleague, “but I found it really, really difficult to read”; “ ‘operating in the vicinity of a different canard,’” wrote the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson, in quotation of Wieseltier “—what does that even mean?” HuffPo’s M.J. Rosenberg put it unimprovably: “Wieseltier’s prose is impenetrable”) – even ignoring that, you might have rated the piece a tad bit over the top. (more...)

soundbite

Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: “I mean business” or “I’m deliberately wasting your time,” or, “Actually, I’m gay,” or “I’ll marry you, but we’ll loathe each other and I’ll leave you for a 20-year old when you’re 37.”

Apparently, Iranians don't do satire very well, no doubt one of the nasty side effects of not having a functional free press. Earlier this year Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari suffered the brunt of Iran's confusion over a Daily Show interview he had participated in. Bahari was jailed during June's protests and then interrogated over video footage of the interview showing him being interviewed by "an American journalist pretending to be a spy." In reality this "spy" was Jason Jones. (more...)

soundbite

“One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.” (more...)

On Friday, David Brooks used his New York Times column to announce the first round of his Sidney Awards for the year's best magazine essays. It was a varied and inspired list -- except out of the six essays chosen, none were written by women. Today, in his second set of winners, that wrong was righted. (more...)

What can we learn about New York Times columnist David Brooks through his favorite essays of the year, published annually as The Sidney Awards? Well, he loves The New Yorker, paid special attention to the health care debate and, uh... doesn't read the work of too many women. Or he, at least, isn't highlighting it. (more...)

The Atlantic's Jim Warren, former managing editor and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, attended the Second City 50th anniversary event in Chicago, which featured alumni of the comedy institution — including a very forthcoming Stephen Colbert. Colbert, who sat for a panel discussion with writers of "The Colbert Report," moderated by NPR's Peter Sagal, talked about the jokes he held back at the 2006 White House Correspondent's Dinner, what he thinks of Glenn Beck and why he couldn't help himself from liking Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. (more...)

Comparing his blog to The Economist and the old Talk of the Town at the New Yorker, Andrew Sullivan ended his December vacation to respond to criticism that erupted over blog posts by Patrick Appel suggesting that other people wrote posts that ended up on Sullivan's Daily Dish at The Atlantic's website.

video It's hard to imagine worse timing. President Obama flew to Norway today (according to Mark Knoller he is only the second president to do so) to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, nine days after announcing to the nation that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Has there ever been a more reluctant Nobel Prize recipient? And yet by most accounts Obama managed to pull it off. (more...)

Now that the White House's war on Fox appears to have simmered down it looks like they may have found a new target for their frustration with media coverage: Politico. Sort of. Yesterday, Politico's John Harris penned a much-read (it's been on Drudge for close to 24 hours now) piece titled "7 Stories Barack Obama Doesn't Want Told." A taste: The president thinks he's playing with monopoly money, he's too much like Spock, etc. Actually, the piece reads like an extended, slightly more reasonable version of a Maureen Dowd column. Either way the White House thought it was worth a response. Sort of. (more...)

Obviously, unless sometime between now and 2012 there occurs a rip in the space-time continuum and the country slips into an alternate reality, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck will not be running on a joint ticket for the presidency. But let's speculate anyway. (more...)

The internet was abuzz this weekend with a report claiming that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fervent opponent of Israel and frequent Holocaust denier, was actually of Jewish ancestry, evidenced by a photo in which the conservative leader held open his identification card after voting. Britain's Daily Telegraph reported early on Saturday in no uncertain terms alongside the accompanying photo (left): (more...)

video Leading up to President Obama's address to schoolchildren on September 6, at least some Americans were upset about the president's direct access to the hearts and minds of their children. But after Obama's remarks were revealed to be wholeheartedly apolitical — really more of a pep talk for the first day of school — the news cycle moved on and no immediate harm was reported. (more...)

First of all, it is a measure of how the mainstream media still views the online world that the NYT piece about Andrew Sullivan's plea for Atlantic print subscribers is titled "A Blogger Makes a Pitch for Supporting Print' . I mean honestly! Considering Andrew Sullivan is on some Sunday morning talk show practically every weekend and averages 160,000 visits a day, he's probably infiltrated the mainstream enough that by not using his name in the hed the Times has just depleted the SEO value of their article. Anyway! (more...)

Mediaite experienced some déjà vu this morning when the press release for the brand new Atlantic 50 landed in our inbox. The '50,' we were informed "follows hundreds of leading opinion-makers and commentators to provide an essential framework to the day’s best analysis and most daring and important arguments." Sound familiar? To us, too! Some digging resulted in this explanation from Atlantic editors as to how they came up with their '50': (more...)

VIDEO If you knew one thing about Sonia Sotomayor in the days before her confirmation hearing, it probably had something to do with her 'wise latina' comment. But which crack journalist pulled this dirty tidbit from Sotomayor's past and thrust it into the center of national news coverage of public debate? (more...)

VIDEO Stupid. The definition of stupidity. Idiotic. Beyond belief. A Disaster. These are the words that Steve Brill uses to describe the way media outlets are passing out their wares for free on the web in an interview with The Atlantic's Bob Cohn at the Aspen Ideas Festival. (more...)