Arlington Magazine Wins Journalism Award

Arlington Magazine has won a prestigious Dateline Award from the Society of Professional Journalists-DC Chapter.

“Behind the Ivy Tower,” by Tamara Lytle, was awarded Best Magazine Feature for 2026. The story examines who gains admission to Ivy League schools and other highly selective universities and how those decisions are made.

Arlington Magazine swept this year’s magazine features category, with two other stories named finalists. “Without a Net,” by Eliza Tebo, offers an in-depth look at the impact of federal funding cuts on the nonprofits that make up Arlington’s safety net. In “A Long and Steadfast Battle Against a Terrible Cancer,” writer Wendy Kantor profiles oncologist Raymond Wadlow, who lost his mother, Emily Couric, to pancreatic cancer and subsequently devoted his career to fighting the disease.

Other magazine winners in this year’s Dateline Awards include Mother Jones, which earned an investigative journalism award for Luke O’Brien’s story about the Trump administration’s use of facial recognition technology, and Washingtonian, whose piece by Dave Levinthal about a crusader fighting political corruption earned accolades for non-breaking news.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Arlington Magazine has earned top honors in the SPJ-DC Dateline Awards. The magazine garnered an art award for cover design in 2025, and best magazine feature awards in 2024 and 2023, for stories about local biotech entrepreneur Paul Romness and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a debilitating disorder that is often misdiagnosed as anxiety.

Other winners in this year’s Dateline Awards include The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Washington Blade and Reuters. The results were announced during a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on June 11, 2026.