ASBPE honored Professional Builder and tED magazine as the B2B Magazines of the Year. American Banker was named Website of the Year, and Architect was recognized with the Cross-Platform Package of the Year award.

The ASBPE’s Azbee Awards, in Overall Excellence, Online, Design, Print, and All Content divisions, were presented as part of its 41st annual Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet, held in conjunction with GenerationB2B, ASBPE’s 2019 National Conference, from May 9-10 at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. ASBPE represents more than 2,000 journalists for B2B publications.

This year, more than 1,100 entries were received and 89 experienced B2B editors and designers judged the 68 categories of entries.

Professional Builder magazine was honored as Magazine of the Year among publications of more than $3 million revenue. Honorable mentions in the category went to ISE Magazine and The Meeting Professional.

tED Magazine was honored as Magazine of the Year among publications of less than $3 million revenue. Honorable-mention recipients were Cannabis Business Times and Exhibitor magazine.

In the Website of the Year competition, American Banker earned the top honor, and TechRepublic and SevenFifty Daily won honorable mentions.

In the Best Cross-Platform Package of the Year competition, Architect was honored for “The R.W. Kern Center at Hampshire College.” ABA Journal (“Legal Rebels”), dvm360 (“Leadership Challenge: Cyberbullying”), and Imaging Technology News (“Coverage of a Hospital”) won honorable mentions.

View the national winner gallery Download PDF of national winners

Related: See who won in the 2019 Regional Azbee Awards.

Stephen Barr Award

ASBPE’s Stephen Barr Award, its top individual feature writing prize, went to Kevin Davis, managing editor for ABA Journal, for “Under Questioning: The Chicago police legacy of extracting false confessions is costing the city millions.” His powerful and deeply backgrounded study examined 30 years of police abuses in extracting false confessions from accused in the City of Chicago.

For his winning article, Davis concentrated on the case of four teens who had said they were responsible for a 1995 double murder in Chicago. They were exonerated only after two decades of appeals by their lawyers, in which it was proved that police had obtained confessions through threats and intimidation. Going far beyond that case, Davis used National Registry of Exonerations data to illustrate how Chicago had been the leading police department in obtaining false confessions for nearly 30 years. His most powerful support came from his interviews with those who had been wrongly convicted, although defense lawyers, prosecutors and outside experts lent their support to his reporting.

Says Davis’s editor and publisher, Molly McDonough, “Kevin is a talented storyteller. His pieces are carefully reported with important details: facts, science and the law.” McDonough adds, though, that it is his ability to capture details about “the people whose lives are impacted that makes him truly outstanding as a reporter and editor.”

This is the 16th Stephen Barr Award. It is named for one of ASBPE’s most honored journalists, who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 43. Unlike other ASBPE awards, it honors individual writing across our feature categories, and especially work that shows inventiveness, insight, balance, depth of investigation, and impact on readers. A check for $500 accompanies the award, endowed by Stephen Barr’s parents and administered by the ASBPE Foundation.

About ASBPE

Founded in 1964 as the American Society of Business Press Editors, ASBPE is the professional association for full-time and freelance editors, writers, art directors, and designers employed in the business, trade, and specialty press. The official name was changed to the American Society of Business Publication Editors in 1997, and to ASBPE in 2012. ASBPE has chapters in cities nationwide, including Chicago, Boston, New York, Kansas City, Cleveland and Washington, D.C.