National Magazine Awards

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is a bilingual, not-for-profit institution whose mission is to recognize excellence in the content and creation of Canadian magazines through an annual program of awards.

Important Dates

Jul 1 - Aug 31, 2008 - Office closed
Sept 1, 2008 - Jury call
Dec 1, 2008 - Call for entries
Jan 7, 2009 - Submissions Deadline
June 5, 2009 - 32nd annual gala

Newsletter

Keep up with all the latest news from the National Magazine Awards - submissions process, deadlines, announcements, tickets and more - but signing up for our e-newsletter, sent 6-8 times per year to your email address. [Subscribe]

Contact Us

The National Magazine Awards
425 Adelaide St West, Suite 700
Toronto, ON, M5V 3C1
staff@magazine-awards.com
(t) 416.422.1358 (f) 416.504.0437

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Magazine Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

"How does judging work?"

We know: the judging process for the National Magazine Awards can seem complicated. Our program is bilingual, so we need English, French and bilingual judges. Our categories include written, visual and integrated content, so we need judges who are editors, art directors, photographers and subject specialists. We do our best to avoid conflicts of interest, so our search for judges stretches across the continent and sometimes beyond. And it's all done with volunteers and the support of a small number of paid contract facilitators. We've worked hard to ensure a fair and transparent process, but we know there's still room for improvement.

This year, we're taking steps to make our awards program even more transparent. You'll find complete rules, a description of our judging process and the Foundation's Governance Policy, here our website. We're committed to surveying the community—that means you!—on an annual basis, just following the awards submissions, to uncover any issues with our processes so that we can address them before the next year's program. We're instituting electronic filing of scores so that we can eliminate the potential for errors in score transcription. And this year, we're adding a French conference call facilitator so that judges on all panels--English and French--will have an opportunity to discuss the entrants they're judging before submitting their final scores.

We know there are more ways we can continue to improve the program, so our efforts will not stop here. As always, those efforts are driven by feedback from the magazine community. If you have thoughts to share, please email us at staff@magazine-awards.com.

And enter the NMAF program knowing that we're committed to ensuring that the Awards reflect excellence—both in who wins and in how those winners are selected. (See Judging Process for a complete description).

Kim Pittaway
President
National Magazine Awards Foundation