If your Sunday newspaper carries Parade Magazine, then you saw this on the cover yesterday. The interview with Benazir Bhutto took place in October, and obviously the magazine went to print well in advance of December 27, the date of her assassination.
I don’t know what their excuse is, frankly, because most news magazines are able to make editorial changes as late as 24 hours before press these days thanks to the advent of using computers and desktop publishing software to layout their issues. I’ve seen various Time-Warner mags have next-day coverage of some events (as in the event happened Sunday and showed up in the magazine I received in the mail on Monday). By contrast, Parade’s own website was able to tag the interview with a brief blurb about the timing and their decision to run the story. They posted the interview on the web immediately after the news broke, as a matter of fact.
This just makes the dead-tree media look bad. Remember the egg on the face of the editors at Elle when their interview with Lindsay Lohan hit the news stands the same day she was arrested for DUI? At least that had some ironic value to it. This just comes across as out-of-touch.
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Hi,
The Parade magazine was already in the hands of newspapers when she was assassinated. Since Parade isn’t a news magazine, they are unable to handle “breaking” events.
The assassination was more than a week prior to yesterday’s issue. Given current technology used by the very newspapers that carry Parade, they had the time to offer an updated cover at least. Even if they aren’t strictly a news magazine, the element of timeliness was certainly a consideration in this particular story.
According to an NPR story I heard yesterday, the Parade mag is printed entirely separately from the newspapers with which it is bundled, so it wasn’t up to the “host” newspapers to change anything — they aren’t the publishers. Not that this is any excuse, but the report stated that it would have cost millions to change the cover and story, and the Parade publishers decided the cover story was still important and relevant. (It probably *is* relevant, but adding a note/disclaimer would have been a better approach.) What I don’t understand, though, is why the “host” papers didn’t just exclude the whole insert under the circumstances. Most readers don’t understand that Parade is not part of their own local paper, partly because it carries the name of the host right on it (which is probably part of why it costs so much to print: many diff versions for all the hundreds of papers with which it is included). It reflects badly on the newspapers and, if I were, say, the publisher of the Boston Globe, I would have just dumped the whole Parade mag for this week.
the Parade mag is printed entirely separately from the newspapers with which it is bundled, so it wasn’t up to the “host” newspapers to change anything
Right. Parade should have sent a separate notice to be included with each paper as they were bundled with the magazines for delivery. The papers aren’t printed and bundled until late Saturday, which gave Parade still more than a week to send small printed notices to be included with the magazines. They just didn’t want to spend the money.
Check out this discussion thread at the professional journalism site Poynter.org and see how embarrassed and angry the journalism community is about this.
The Maine Sunday Telegram did include a disclaimer on its front page about this week’s Parade magazine. But if you missed it, as we did, its appearance without any reference to Bhutto’s assassination was extremely unfortunate.
Good for the editors at the Maine Sunday Telegram for showing better judgement than the editors at Parade.