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“You know, there are many fun parts of the job, and the most fun part is figuring out what the cover is every week.”
If that quote sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because it’s from the previous post.
It’s what Time Magazine managing editor Jim Kelly said in an interview with Mediabistro.com.
After posting that comment about how much fun Jim Kelly has figuring
out what the cover of Time is every week, I was heading out of my
office when I was surprised to see in my in-box an old copy of Time
from earlier this year. But then I realized it was the current issue
and was merely evocative of the earlier issue.
That’s when I realized how much fun Jim Kelly and his staff must really
be having each week. First, they have fun trying to guess what
Newsweek’s cover will be and then seeing how close they can come to matching it.
Or, if that’s no fun, they’ll look through all the year’s previous
issues, choose one, and then try to see just how closely they can mimic
it on this week’s cover before anyone notices.
This sounds almost as much fun as the editors at Maxim
who ran random blurbs from other magazines on their November cover to
parody the fact that no one looks at anything on a Maxim cover but the
model.
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What fun it must be when
someone yells across the Time offices to Jim, “Hey, I bet we could run
the same cover every week and no one would notice.” And then Jim laughs
and yells back, “Okay, you’re on.”
Sometimes, however, when they’re having fun doing this, it serendipitously results in something seriously remarkable. I guess that’s when it’s really fun.
