The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. The awards have been presented annually since 1966.

They are generally considered the highest award in the magazine industry; in the magazine world, they are roughly equivalent to the Pulitzer Prizes (which are far more widely known in the popular culture, but do not include a magazine category).

Recipients of awards are selected in a two-step procedure: First, entries are reviewed by a judging panel, which recommends a group of finalists; then, a second panel of judges chooses one winner in each category. Categories include General Excellence, Personal Service, Leisure Interests, Reporting, Public Interest, Feature Writing, Profile Writing, Essays, Columns and Commentary, Reviews and Criticism, Magazine Section, Single-Topic Issue, Design, Photography, Photojournalism, Photo Portfolio, Fiction, General Excellence Online, Personal Service Online, and Interactive Feature.

Anna Wintour, OBE (born 3 November 1949) is the English-born editor-in-chief of American Vogue, a position she has held since 1988. With her trademark pageboy bob haircut and sunglasses, Wintour has become an institution throughout the fashion world, widely praised for her eye for fashion trends and her support for younger designers. Her reportedly aloof and demanding personality has earned her the nickname "Nuclear Wintour".

She is the eldest daughter of Charles Wintour, editor of the London Evening Standard. Anna became interested in fashion as a teenager. Her father consulted her on how to make the newspaper relevant to the youth of the era. Her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines. Later she moved to the United States, with stints at New York and House & Garden. She returned home for a year to turn around British Vogue, and later assumed control of the franchise's magazine in New York, reviving what many saw as a stagnating publication. Her use of the magazine to shape the fashion industry has been the subject of debate within it. Animal rights activists have attacked her for promoting fur, while other critics have charged her with using the magazine to promote elitist views of femininity and beauty.

George Musser is a senior editor for Scientific American magazine in New York and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory. He did his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown University and his graduate studies in planetary science at Cornell University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. His thesis work modeled mantle convection on Venus in order to explain broad plateaus, known as coronae, mapped by the Magellan orbiter. Musser served as editor of Mercury magazine and of the Universe in the Classroom tutorial series at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a science and science-education nonprofit based in San Francisco.

A number of articles Musser solicited and edited have appeared in The Best American Science Writing and The Best American Science & Nature Writing anthologies. He was the originator and one of the lead editors for the single-topic issue “A Matter of Time,” Scientific American (Sept. 2002), which won a National Magazine Award for editorial excellence, and he coordinated the single topic issue “Crossroads for Planet Earth,” Scientific American (Sept. 2005), which won a Global Media Award from the Population Institute and was a National Magazine Award finalist. In 2010, Musser won the Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the Division for Planetary Sciences for his science writing on planetary sciences. In 2011, Musser won the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for his article "Could Time End?" in the September 2010 issue of Scientific American.

Michael Kinsley (born March 9, 1951) is an American political journalist, commentator, television host, and pundit. Primarily active in print media as both a writer and editor, he also became known to television audiences as a co-host on Crossfire. Kinsley has been a notable participant in the mainstream media's development of online content.

Kinsley was born in Detroit, Michigan. He attended the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, then graduated from Harvard College in 1972. At Harvard, Kinsley served as vice president of the University's daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, then returned to Harvard for law school. While still a third-year law student, he began working at The New Republic and was allowed to finish his Harvard Juris Doctor degree via courses at the evening program at The George Washington University Law School.

Kinsley's first exposure to a national television audience was as moderator of William Buckley's Firing Line. In 1979 Kinsley became editor of The New Republic and wrote that magazine's TRB column for most of the 1980s and 1990s. That column was also reprinted in a variety of newspaper op-ed pages, including the Washington Post, and made Kinsley's reputation as a leading political commentator. Kinsley also served as editor at Harper's (for a year and a half in the early 1980s), managing editor of Washington Monthly (in the mid-1970s, while still in school), and American Editor of The Economist (a short-term, honorary position).

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.