The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) presents its annual “best covers of the year,” with this great one from The New Yorker as the winner.

If you look at the entries in all the categories, you will also find these covers from New York Magazine.

They are fantastic covers.

Always different.

Provocative.

Smart.

And, the most important fact: you know that they belong to New York magazine!

The revival of this city weekly is one of the best news in the magazine industry.

Congratulations and enjoy the show!

Newspapers and magazines have been always excellent public art galleries for the best illustrators in the world.

This is a tradition that we have to keep alive.

Please join me in this tribute to the best of the best.

Let’s start with these two from Saul Steinberg, the first done in 1948 and the second (“View of the World from 9th Avenue”) a cover drawing for The New Yorker from March 29, 1976.

Quotes from angry readers screaming against the power failure.

A good front page.

But no one has been better than the cover of the New Yorker after a similar situation in Manhattan a few years ago:

Is Water Next?

A perfect headline for the much needed what’s-next journalism.

I am from Barcelona.

So, I can’t understand why almost all the city has been with no electricity for two days.

Catalans are seen in many parts of Spain as prone to separatism.

Well… here are some ways to prevent it:

One: Privatize the state-controlled, third-world Barcelona airport.

Now, you have to connect in Madrid for too many international flights.

In my whole life, Barcelona airport is the only one to have lost one of my suitcases!

Two: Speed up the arrival of fast trains – coming to Barcelona later than to any other big city in Spain.

A shame when the first train line in Spain was the Barcelona-Mataro one.

Third: Invest in the orbital highways around Barcelona.

See the differences with Madrid in this graphic chart posted in an excellent Catalan blog.

Ken Auletta, media correspondent from The New Yorker, writes a long story about the Murdoch bid for Dow Jones.

Read it and you will see how the deal is almost done.

Money, money, money.

Don’t be confused.

The Bancrofts don’t care about quality journalism.

They never re-invested their profits.

They were there just for the easy and big dividends.

While Dow Jones was left behind by Bloomberg, Thompson, Reuters…

So, Murdoch can do it better.

Like him or not.

He is a newspaper publisher.

As Jeff Jarvis says in his great blog, they are just “absentee owners.”

Thanks to Balazos, I found this great comment by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

Just as few paragraphs of this masterpiece:

“The cell phones in the pockets of the dea students were still ringing when we were tol that it was wrong to ask why.

As the polic cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tec engineering building, the cell phones rang, in th eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kep trying to see if their children were O.K.

To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringin is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable.

. . .

Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we’ll live with the risk.

There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register.

Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why.”