American Society of Magazine Editors - Stories Behind the 2009 Best in News & Business Magazine Cover Finalists

Stories Behind the 2009 Best in News & Business Magazine Cover Finalists

October 6, 2009

Delicious | Entertainment & Celebrity | Fashion & Beauty | House & Home | Lifestyle

	*The Advocate, May 2009*
	A photograph of a “surprised” blow-up doll seemed like a perfect cover illustration for the cover story “Porn Panic,” which examined how the recession was hurting the porn industry. The only trouble was that most blow-up dolls (and nearly all of them with their mouths open) are female—and the story focused primarily on gay porn. Photographer Michael Elins worked with the magazine’s art team to come up with a great solution—an amalgam of several different dolls brought together through post-production. This doll is playful and provocative without being too sexual and, together with the main cover line, tells readers exactly what they can expect inside.

	*GQ, November 2008*
	Jimmy Kimmel was photographed by Mark Seliger as President Richard Nixon and President John F. Kennedy for the November 2008 cover of GQ. On one version of the November issue—the cover line declares “Jimmy Kimmel Says Vote Republican So This Damn Thing Can Finally Be Over.” The other version declares: “Jimmy Kimmel Says Vote Democrat So This Damn Thing Can Finally Be Over.” It’s an entire issue dedicated to politics and the culmination of the very, very long and engaging 2008 presidential campaign. Seliger captured Kimmel doing his best presidential impersonations in a determined act of bipartisanship.

	*National Geographic, July 2008*
	Brent Stirton, the recipient of awards from the Overseas Press Club, American Photography, the London Association of Photographers, and ASME (for this cover story), among numerous other organizations, captures an unforgettably tragic image in the blank, saddened stare of an animal whose species is gradually disappearing. The same empathy that earned him awards from the United Nations for his work on the environment and in the field of HIV is evident in the way he frames the gorilla’s face, finding within its glassy eyes a quiet desolation that speaks to the tragedy of its potential extinction. The photo is both intimate and distancing, simple and profound, and reveals the paradoxical beauty and horror that haunts Africa’s oldest park.

	*New York, March 2, 2009*
	Bernie Madoff’s historic swindle was one of the biggest stories in New York—and the country—this year. In its March 2, 2009, cover treatment, New York magazine eschewed familiar business-magazine conventions for a bold, daring, and somewhat gruesome depiction of Madoff as the Joker. The artist, Darrow, takes a banal-but-emotional news photo of Madoff and turns its subject into “the grinning, bloodshot-eyed Joker, the diabolical supervillain who delights in terrorizing Batman’s Gotham City,” as the Associate Press described the cover in a story on the economy’s new villains. The sheer audacity of Madoff’s pathological stunt, plus his inscrutable smile and physical resemblance to the comic-book villain, made the Joker an ideal embodiment of the notorious schemer.

	*The New Yorker, July 21, 2008*
	Barry Blitt’s cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, entitled “The Politics of Fear,” sought to satirize the many rumors that had been circulating about presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, put it in a statement at the time, “Our cover ‘The Politics of Fear’ combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall—all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover.” The cover inspired a fierce debate about the nature and effectiveness of satire, but it is worth noting that the stereotypes depicted in Blitt’s drawing were rarely levied against the Obamas from that point forward, and soon faded from prominence in the national political conversation.

	*Sports Illustrated, December 29, 2008*
	Sweet Jasmine was one of the 51 pit bulls rescued from the Michael Vick-financed Bad Newz Kennels in April 2007, a story that dominated headlines in 2007 and 2008. Just a year and a half later, photographer Simon Bruty has Jasmine posed in a way that brings to mind William Wegman and his famous Weimaraners—a stunning contrast to Jasmine’s pugnacious past. Her innocent bearing, combined with the photo’s holiday-themed colors (red background and green leash), strike at the heart of Jim Gorant’s cover story and provide an uplifting end to 2008: in spite of the abuse they suffered at Bad Newz, even the most traumatized of the rescued pit bulls can have a happy new year.