Newsweeklies reveal their wartime strategies

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 1991 by Tony Silber

NEW YORK City-It was mid-January, the week after the shooting started in the Persian Gulf, and on newsstands across America the newsweeklies were embattled in a brawl of another kind.

Time was a timepiece. Its January 28 cover had a photo of the Baghdad sky lit up with tracer fire, as it was at 2:44 Am on January 17. Newsweek featured an American pilot, thumbs up, his face a mix of determination-and anxiety. U.S. News & World Report had a white-hot cruise missile flashing off a ship into the murky blue night.

Through their cover stories, the newsweeklies try to summarize the singular event that has fixed the nation's attention. For seven weeks, the compelling story was the war in the Gulf. And for seven weeks, the three magazines were locked in a battle on the newsstands. Knowing ahead of time what the others' story would be didn't make it any easier to outdo their competitors.

Rarely do these combatants have an opportunity to compete as directly with each other as they did during this period. Military restrictions on news and a small theater of operations put all three magazines on a level playing field. The winner would be determined by editorial ingenuity, perspicacity and blind luck.

How were cover subjects chosen? "You find that your cover image decisions are made on small but important criteria," such as how well the image fits on the cover, says Newsweek foreign editor Peter McGrath. "You try to figure out where the story is going to be four or five days from the day you have to make a decision. The other thing we think about is the mood of the readers: Do they feel upbeat or downbeat about a given news development?" The cover must reflect the anticipated attitude of the reader.

Adds Time executive editor Richard Duncan: "You're driven by the news. it's a case where you're not walking along through the events looking where to go, you're riding the horse, you're riding the news. You go where the news takes you."

"You're always thinking about the competition to some extent, but more than that, you're thinking about your audience. What can I bring to my audience that is different from this blitz of coverage?" says US. News co-editor Michael Ruby.

Here's a look at how the newsweeklies made some difficult cover decisions during the war.

* January 28: This was the first cover date after the war started. Newsstand sales shot up, giving the three titles their biggest windfall of the war. Time sold about 425,000 copies, a 115 percent hike over its first-half 1990 average of about 197,000, says Time general manager Ellen Fairbanks.

Newsweek sold about 402,829 copies of its January 28 issue, a 127 percent hike over the first-half 1990 average of 177,458, says Michael Grissom, Newsweek's circulation marketing development manager.

US. News & World Report sold about 134, 100 copies the same week, says spokesman Matt Tucker. That's a 98 percent increase over last year's average of 67,784.

Newsweek thought its January 28 cover crystallized the nation's feelings. "It came down to which photo conveyed the feeling of the event," McGrath says. "Ours conveyed the sense that the opening phase of the war had gone well from a military point of view."

US. News went with the cruise missile photo because, "We just all thought that that was a very effective image," explains Ruby. But why such a small photo? "It basically is a horizontal photo," he says. "It would have had some unfortunate cropping to turn it into a vertical."

Time had the Baghdad sky with the clock. "It gives a sense of history to include that time," Duncan declares. "I think the same is true of our victory cover [March-111. These are cases where the occasion and the image sort of speak for themselves and you want to back off and let that happen. You don't plaster type all over the moment."

* February 4: Newsweek was a big winner here. It went with the television image of Navy flyer Jeffrey Zaun, shot down and paraded on Iraqi television, his face lacerated and bruised. "The thinking there was that it was an image with a certain iconic value," McGrath says. "We chose an image that said this may not be a cakewalk after all. And Lt. Zaun was the image that best conveyed that."

Newsweek also had a fold-out Gulf War map in this issue.

U.S. News put General Colin Powell on the cover. Ruby explains: "This was keyed off a Powell press conference where he gave an absolutely virtuoso performance, and where he gave one of the most memorable quotes of the war. [Referring to the Iraqi army, Powell said,

First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.'] We decided to capitalize on that."

* February 11: Time's cover featured burned-out armored personnel carriers after the battle of Khafji, with the headline, "Saddam's Weird War." Duncan says this was the toughest week of the war to come up with a cover. McGrath says Newsweek deliberately chose not to put Khafji on the cover, because "It would have felt to us like last week's news."

* February 25: Newsweek had its poorest newsstand performance of the war, and acknowledges that "Saddam on the Ropes" didn't work. "The theme is about what you would expect for the war at that stage," says McGrath. "Was it the story line that didn't quite snap, or was it the cover image? I don't know."