Afghanistan: not fit for America’s front page


Stella Artois beer is Belgian. In Belgium it is so cheap and plentiful, they could refill the canals of Bruges with its gaseous flows.

In the UK, it’s marketed as an expensive and sophisticated Gallic brew – the kind of thing one might order to impress Emmanuelle Béart (showing my age there). It’s an old trick: same product, different markets.

From the HuffPo – a tale of two magazines, Time and Newsweek – worldly to the world, homely to the folks at home…


2 responses to “Afghanistan: not fit for America’s front page”

  1. This sort of “revelation” (which it isn’t, since both Time and Newsweek openly display all the covers on their web sites each week) may garner a few sneers from … well, from the HuffPo crowd, but those in the American magazine business read things like this and just end up rolling their eyes at the idiocy of the HuffPo types.

    Simply put, most American magazines, and American news magazines in particular, get the overwhelming majority of their circulation from subscriptions; for every copy purchased on a newsstand, 25 go to subscribers. As such, they could mail out issues with entirely blank covers if they wanted to, and the “important stories of the day” would still get to everyone that wants them.
    And indeed, in both instances you list here, the full articles did appear in the U.S. editions; they just weren’t highlighted on the cover.

    For better or worse, the classic newsstand model no longer exists in the United States, particularly outside the largest cities. Time, Newsweek, and all other magazines have to design covers that will stand out in order to catch the eye of someone randomly perusing a selection of magazines in a supermarket checkout line, or in a tiny corner of a gigantic megabookstore. All they’re trying to do is create impulse buys. Isn’t it better that the magazine gets picked up and purchased, with the “important” article inside of it, than if the “important” article is highlighted on the cover and thus fewer people pick it up in the first place? (Especially when single-copy sales hardly even matter at all when it comes to overall circulation?)

    Oh, here’s one more data point: The U.S. circulation of both Time and Newsweek is roughly five to six times the circulation of all their international editions combined. So at the end of the day, you can be assured that far more “idiot Americans” read those Afghanistan articles than did citizens of any other country on Earth, despite our supposedly “dumbed-down” covers.

  2. I shouldn’t have gone for the cheap headline (which in true cheap style should have had a question-mark).

    My point was simply that – like beer – the same news can sell itself in very different ways. In Europe, for example, both Timeand Newsweek enjoy a more highbrow reputation than in the States – and a much lower circulation.