National Magazine Award (Canada)

The National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMAF) is a bilingual, not-for-profit institution whose mission is to recognize excellence in the content and creation of Canadian magazines through an annual program of awards. The National Magazine Awards gala takes place each June in Toronto. Each year the NMAF relies on over 100 volunteer judges to evaluate the entries and award gold and silver winners in the written, visual, integrated and special categories.

A 20-member board of directors mostly drawn from the Canadian magazine industry governs the NMAF. The current president of the board of directors of the NMAF is Nino Di Cara, Executive Vice President, Content Marketing for Bookmark (formerly Spafax).

In 1976 Andrew MacFarlane, Dean of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), was trying to revive the university's recently defunct President's Medal for Canadian Magazine Journalism. His original idea was to create a new award divided into English and French counterparts. But MacFarlane eventually developed a proposal for a series of magazine awards, whose salient features were that the program would be bilingual – and therefore truly national – and would recognize individual excellence in the many aspects of the magazine industry – writers, illustrators, editors, photographers and art directors.

MacFarlane together with John S. Crosbie, president of the Magazine Association of Canada, secured the participation of the Canadian Periodical Publishers Association (CPPA), representing 193 Canadian magazines, and CPPA's former president Michael de Pencier. MacFarlane reached out to his counterpart at Université Laval, Roger de la Garde, Alan Edmunds, head of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), and veteran newsman Pierre Berton, among others. As the collective effort began to take shape across the country, by the spring of 1977 the National Magazine Awards had developed a clear mandate.

On 14 November 1977, National Magazine Awards Foundation received its charter of non-profit foundation status from the Province of Ontario.

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