• Folio, Monday, May 4, 2009 9:45 AM

Backpacker, Esquire, Wired and The New Yorker were the top winners at the 44th annual National Magazine Awards, winning three Ellies each. A normally boozy, raucous affair, the award ceremony didn't feel much like a celebration this year, given the seemingly endless waves of layoffs, magazine closings and reports of hemorrhaging ad pages in 2009.

A noteworthy moment in the proceedings was when four of the magazine industry's iconic editors -- Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, Tina Brown, Vogue's Anna Wintour and Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter -- presented photographer Annie Leibovitz with a general excellence Ellie. It was the first general excellence award ever to be awarded to an individual, not a magazine.

Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith delivered the best acceptance speech of the night, thanking everyone from George W. Bush and Karl Rove to "chainsaw-wielding murderers" and Willie Nelson, for making the job of covering the state of Texas an "easy" one. Texas Monthly won for general excellence, 250,000 to 500,000 circulation.

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