Tim and Zac were apparently too busy recapping reality television and creating graphical jokes about the future of the Trinity River park to stop to brag about themselves yesterday, and so it falls to me to do so on their behalf.
D Magazine took home the biggest prize available at Monday evening’s City and Regional Magazine Association awards, which were handed out at a star-absent ceremony at the Grand Hyatt Denver.
“General Excellence” honors the top magazine of the year in each of three circulation classes (D Magazine is a middleweight). Our print product beat out the other finalists at our readership level: Cincinnati, Indianapolis Monthly, Portland Monthly, and Seattle Met. All excellent magazines themselves, which makes the prize all the sweeter and far from a sure thing headed into the ceremony.
So if you see editor Tim Rogers out and about — and obviously after you’ve told him that his Real Housewives posts are the best work he’s ever done — take a moment to congratulate him. And do the same for the entire editorial and art teams who contributed to the win: Zac Crain, Christiana Nielson, Peter Simek, Nancy Nichols, Eve Hill-Agnus, Kevin Goodbar, Britta Hazel, Elizabeth Lavin, Audrey Swanson, Eric Celeste, Tara Nieuwesteeg, Michael J. Mooney, Liz Johnstone, Catherine Downes, Alex Macon — as well as all the others whose names you saw in bylines and image credits in the pages of the magazine in 2015.
Over on my bits-and-bytes side of the editorial bullpen, we were just as excited about taking the prize for “Multiplatform Storytelling.” We actually had scored two finalists in the category, so there was some concern about competing with ourselves, but we managed to beat out strong competition from Baltimore, Chicago, and Madison magazines. This award comes for the combination of an article or feature that appears in print and the extra bells and whistles created alongside it on our website.
I’d have been happy enough if had been our Best Burgers package that won, but I’m even more pleased that it was our Neighborhood Guides (along with print’s real-estate cover story from last July) that earned the recognition. This project had been an ambition of mine since I took over as DMagazine.com’s editorial director more than six years ago. I’d like to thank the residents of the dozens of neighborhoods we’ve featured so far for teaching me about their communities and for sharing personal essays about what makes their corners of Dallas such special places to lives.
Our digital art and tech director, Ricky Ferrer, took the concepts that were in my mind and translated them into a great design. Our former assistant digital art director, Renee Blostein, suffered a broken arm as a result of working late on the Neighborhood Guides and slipping on an office floor left wet by the cleaning crew, so it’s only a slight exaggeration to claim that blood was spilled to make the guides a reality.
None of it would have been possible without Adam Anderly, whose not an official D staffer but handles the heavy lifting development and maintenance of our website’s structure. We essentially were asking him to build an entirely new website for us. He never flinched, even as I kept piling on new desired features.
And lastly, because she deserves far from the least amount of credit for this project, our front-end developer Christina Rees, who routinely demonstrates enormous amounts of patience whenever I ask, “Hey, I had an idea last night. Is this possible?” She put so much work into creating the tools through which the guides came to life that it was fitting that it was she whom we forced to march from one end of the hotel ballroom to the other to pick up our plaque.
OK, enough. So proud of the entire team here at D Magazine World Headquarters. Feels good to have hard work recognized by others in our industry. Now, back to it, trying to produce something just as good so we can celebrate all over again next year.
