• WWD.com, Tuesday, March 21, 2006 11:15 AM

Among the observations that found their way to print following the recent nominations for this year's Ellie awards (the, uh, Oscars of the magazine industry, awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors): 1) The New Yorker, a perennial big winner, got snubbed this year, and 2) Hachette Filipacchi's magazines, which seem
never to be nominated, were not nominated again in 2006. Women's Wear Daily's Jeff Bercovici, who covers the mag business, takes on the matter of Hachette.The company, which publishes 16 titles, hasn't received so much as a single nod in the last six years. How can that be? "A ... convincing case posits that Hachette's cost-conscious mind-set is to blame, yielding handicaps such as relatively poor paper quality and low editorial-to-advertising page ratios," writes Bercovici. "Condé Nast, which perennially dominates the ASMEs (and which owns WWD), has historically been as much concerned with market share as with profit-loss ratios, noted one Hachette editor: 'They have the ability to lavish huge amounts of space on subjects, and that's what's rewarded--length, and, to some degree, pomposity.'"

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