Ad Age Publishers A-List 2019: presenting the Magazine A-List honorees
EDITOR'S NOTE: For 2019, we've expanded our annual publishing-industry honors program. It's now known as the Ad Age Publishers A-List and it includes the Magazine A-List, below, plus a new set of Digital Publishers A-List honorees. Read the introduction and find links to the other portions of the package here.
The California Sunday Magazine
Founded in late 2014 by Douglas McGray and Chas Edwards, The California Sunday Magazine is a six-times-a-year glossy that's distributed to 350,000 subscribers of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Under Editor-in-Chief McGray, the title is gloriously, well, magazineyserving as a forum for longform reporting (e.g., Mark Arax's epic 20,000-word feature "A Kingdom From Dust," about Big Agriculture, water and immigrant labor). It's won scores of honors in its short life, including three National Magazine Awards, and its photojournalism is so stellar that the current photo-essay issue, "At Home: In the American West," became a gallery exhibition at New York's prestigious Aperture Foundation. Publisher Edwards has lured in big brands such as Coach and Google Pixel (which sponsored "At Home"), and together with McGray helped secure the most impressive validation yet: their magazine's late-November acquisition, along with sibling events division Pop-Up Magazine (see our Event Publisher A-List), by Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective.