The Best in Town

Yes, it’s boastful, but I am compelled to report that for the third consecutive year, Twin Cities Business received the gold award for “Overall Excellence” among larger-circulation business and trade publications at the 12th annual Excellence Awards presentations of the Minnesota Magazine and Publications Association (MMPA).

For the second consecutive year, Twin Cities Business received more gold awards (eight this year) and more total awards (14, five of them silver and one bronze) than any other publication in the association.

In addition to the Overall Excellence award, the magazine received the best award given in these seven categories: Best Feature Article, Best Overall Design, Best Single Cover, Best Use of Illustrations, Best Use of Photography, Best Regular Column, and Best Special Section or Supplement.

Six of the magazine’s 14 awards were for writing and editing, six were for design, and two were for a combination of the two. The most gratifying was a silver award in “Best Digital Media,” for the tcbmag.com Web site, some current content of which is noted on page 7 of this issue. Tcbmag.com was not launched until late fall 2007. Until then, our Web site was among the worst in all of American publishing—a truly pitiable presentation of staff phone numbers and advertising rates. Receiving recognition for its improvement is undeniably rewarding.

The MMPA comprises approximately 100 Minnesota-based magazine publishing companies. This year’s Excellence Awards attracted more than 640 entries from 104 publications.

Still with us? Five paragraphs of bragging are more than enough, don’t you think? I want you to know that we’ve found a few ways to stay humble.

Contributing to that effort was a misspelling on last month’s cover, where the word “embezzled” appeared—in half-inch-tall type—without the m.

Now, at the time the magazine was mailed to subscribers, the Dow Jones average had completed a 48 percent decline and economists were weighing the likely severity of an impending recession. You might be thinking that there are bigger things to worry about than a missing letter in one of 80,000 words that appeared in that issue.

And you would be right, but only if you’d never worked in magazine publishing, where misspellings on the cover are taboo—embarrassments, errors that simply are not allowed to happen.