2016 National Azbee Award Winners

Emergency Management, The American Lawyer, Architect Win Top 2016 ASBPE Honors; Tom Wadsworth of Door + Access Systems Receives Its Stephen Barr Award

The 2016 Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet, held at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies
The 2016 Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet, held at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies

ASBPE honored Emergency Management and The American Lawyer as Magazines of the Year for 2016 and named Architect as its Website of the Year. The organization of business-to-business editors chose UBM Life Sciences, Veterinary as winner of its award for Best Cross-Platform Package of the Year.

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Download a list of the winners

ASBPE’s Stephen Barr Award, its top individual feature writing prize, went to Tom Wadsworth of Door + Access Systems newsmagazine for his Fall 2015 article “The Worst Garage Door Company in the Nation.” His investigation into the long-running scams associated with Garage Door Services Co., and its founder Peter James Stephens Jr., exposed in a detailed fashion the methods used by a complex national network of garage door repair shops. Much of Wadsworth’s reporting drew on interviews with current and former Garage Door Services employees and internal company records. In addition to an outpouring of reader responses, his 8,300-word report prompted Better Business Bureau warnings about deceptive company tactics, and numerous follow-up reports by other media that cited the Door + Access article. Read more about Tom Wadsworth’s Stephen Barr Award.

The ASBPE honors, in Overall Excellence, Online, Design, and Print divisions, were presented as part of its 38th annual Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet, held in conjunction with ASBPE’s Essential Elements: The B2B Media Success Conference, held July 21 at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. ASBPE, which represents more than 1,000 journalists for B2B, or “trade publications,” was originally known as the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

This year, nearly 1,150 Azbee entries were submitted in 75 categories.

ASBPE named five Young Leader Scholars at the banquet: Whitney Wyckoff Associate Managing Editor/Copy and Production Manager at FedScoop/Scoop News Group; Laura D’Alessandro, Integrated Media Editor for American Public Power Association – Public Power Magazine; Alexa Boschini, Home Accents Today of Progressive Business Media; Robin Donovan, Signs of the Times magazine of the ST Media Group and Joelle Harms, Sr. Digital Media Content Producer for North Coast Media, LLC. Learn more about the five 2016 Young Leaders

Also acknowledged at the ceremony was Elena Gritzan, a journalism masters graduate at Toronto’s Ryerson University, who received the Student Writing Award offered by the ASBPE Foundation and the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Read more about the Student Writing Award winner, Elena Gritzan

The American Lawyer was honored as Magazine of the Year among publications of more than $3 million revenue. Honorable mentions in the category went to QSR magazine and HealthLeaders, with Restaurant Business, Automotive News, Hospitality Design, Architect, Government Technology, InvestmentNews and The Meeting Professional  filling out the Top Ten magazines.

Emergency Management was honored as Magazine of the Year among publications of less than $3 million revenue. Honorable-mention recipients were ABA Journal and Business Jet Traveler, and FSR magazine, Architectural Lighting, Control, Wearables, Insurance Business America, Pragmatic Marketer and Scrap rounded out the Top Ten.

In the Website of the Year competition, Architect Magazine’s architectmagazine.com site earned the top honor, and CIO Magazine’s CIO.com and Security Management’s sm.asisonline.org site won honorable mentions. Filling out the rest of the Top Ten were cbsinteractive.com, supermarketnews.com, abajournal.com, investmentnews.com, csoonline.com, ibamag.com, and computerworld.com.

In the Best Cross-Platform Package of the Year competition, UBM Life Sciences, Veterinary was honored with the best cross-platform package for “The burden of care: A dvm360 leadership challenge.”Automotive News and Engineering News-Record won honorable mentions. Filling out the rest of the Top Ten were Supermarket News, Remodeling, Commercial Carrier Journal, CRN, Federal Times, Counselor, and Workforce.

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The Print division has always been the most popular division for submissions, and this year it represented nearly half of all submissions to the Azbees. Group Profile is a new category this year,  and the most popular individual category in the Print division is the competitive Feature Article-General Interest category. Among the awards in individual Print categories, the Gold award for Feature Series went to Automotive news, while ABA Journal and InvestmentNews won for General-Interest Feature and Healthcare Design and Engineering News-Record won for Case History and Healthcare Design and Automotive News won for Company Profile. Convenience Store News won for How-To Article, and The American Lawyer won for Individual Profile. Among others winning Golds were Automotive News for News Analysis; Plastics News for On-Site Trade Show Coverage; Health Facilities Management and FoodService Director for Original Research; Engineering News-Record for Technical Article; and Conway for Visual Storytelling.

The most popular individual categories in the Design division were the front cover, opening page/spread, and feature article design categories. Security Management and Realtor won Gold for Front Cover- Illustration, while CSP, Security Management and The Meeting Professional won for Feature Article Design. In the Best Overall Typography category, tEd Magazine earned the Gold; and Restaurant Business won in the Magazine Design category.

In the popular Online division, one new category was added, Data Journalism, and the most popular individual categories in the Online division were the Web Feature Article and Impact/Investigative. In Digital categories, Computerworld won for Enterprise News Story. SearchHealthIT won for Video-Tutorial, while Door + Access Systems won for Impact/Investigative. Best New or Relaunched Website honors went to WardsAuto. Among the  media categories, Best Podcast went to EDUCAUSE Review, Best Photo Gallery went to SearchDataCenter.com, and Architect was recognized for its social media efforts.

Related: See who won in the 2016 Regional Azbee Awards.

About ASBPE

Founded in 1964 as the American Society of Business Press Editors, ASBPE is the professional association for full-time and freelance editors, writers, art directors, and designers employed in the business, trade, and specialty press. The official name was changed to the American Society of Business Publication Editors in 1997, and to ASBPE in 2012. ASBPE has chapters in cities nationwide, including Chicago, Boston, New York, Kansas City, Cleveland and Washington, D.C.

Its Stephen Barr Award, sponsored by the nonprofit ASBPE Foundation, is named for one of ASBPE’s more honored journalists, who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 43. It recognizes individual writing across the Azbee’s feature categories.

 

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