Hey AOL CEO Tim Armstrong: We fixed this for you. (Useful context, for the confused.)
TIME Person of the Year: President Obama
(Photo: TIME)
In addition to President Obama, the short list for Person of the Year included Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!; Mohammed Morsi, president of Egypt; Undocumented Americans; Bill and Hillary Clinton; Malala Yousafzai, the student activist from Pakistan who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban; Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple; and the Higgs Boson and Italian physicist Fabiola Giannati.
He won a second term. His signature piece of legislation passed judicial muster. He still has weaknesses (see: drones), but ultimately he’s looking a lot stronger in 2012 than he was in 2011. Seems like an obvious one. Side note: Based on the Flickr iOS app alone — a clear sign that things are turning around at Yahoo — Marissa Mayer would have been an awesome choice.
What will you do with your extra second? On June 30, 2012, everyone will get one extra second of time to do everything they ever hoped to do with their life. According to CNET, “The leap second will be added to Coordinated Universal Time at the end of the day” in order to keep atomic clocks in line. So get ready for the time to read 23:59:60.
We plan to spend our extra second blinking.
Magnets and an iPod Nano are all it takes to make a tiny music player part of your body: It’s not for everyone, and we’re not just talking about the video above. Dave Hurban implanted magnets in his skin to hold the iPod in place, much like a wristwatch. But why, WHY would someone ever do this to themselves? “I just thought it would be cool,” Hurban said. Unfortunately for Hurban, it’ll be harder for him to upgrade his Nano the next time around, especially if Apple changes its style — like, you know, it does nearly every single year. source
Next week’s cover features North Korea’s newest leader Kim Jong Un and hits newsstands Friday. Inside the issue we’ve got a great feature on NBA star Jeremy Lin, a look at the unexpected success of Rick Santorum and an appreciation of Whitney Houston.
Unless Kim Jong Un wore this getup (SFW, kinda) at the MTV VMAs, you can’t call him Lil’ Kim. EDIT: What could’ve been.
» So, ever watch a TV show where the lead character breaks the fourth wall? Say, like “Malcolm in the Middle” or “Saved by the Bell”? They might even re-order things in time and space while talking to the audience. The other characters might be unaware of the gap in time created. Now imagine scientists doing that — with the help of lasers and special lenses called “time lenses.” The process, called “temporal cloaking,” is a bit more complex than that, and is a scientific novelty more than something the regular person can do something with at this point — but that doesn’t make it any less awesome-sounding. Hop over to the full article for a deeper explanation.
Last week’s issue also caused considerable consternation among bloggers and readers, who objected to our putting the protests in Egypt inside our domestic edition and on the cover overseas. “Why is anxiety the most pressing issue in the U.S. while the Egyptian revolution gets front-page treatment internationally?” read a typical e-mail. Observers at ShortFormBlog analyzed a year’s worth of our covers and concluded each edition gets the same amount of hard news, give or take an issue or two. We’re glad to be held to high expectations, especially when the bar is set by one of our own editions.
Good on Time for directly responding to the controversy.
johnness asks: I was around Newsweek International from 2000-2003, and I think what you see is consistent with longterm trends: Newsmagazines everywhere love soft news generally, but an editor of an international edition (usually someone in NYC) has faith that someone in Tokyo will care about big news in Kenya and vice-versa. The top editor for the American version of a newsmagazine will devote most of their limited "news" covers to domestic happenings. A folo cover on Egypt wouldn't likely be considered.
» SFB says: Thanks for the take on this piece, John. It’s worth noting that Newsweek’s covers tend to go strongly domestic as well. Much appreciated. — Ernie @ SFB
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Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
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thingsmostgrey asks: In your zine, you showed a pic of the "Germany can't save the world" cover as one of the ones that the US missed out on, but I subscribe to Time and we did have that issue in the US (but I think it looked a bit different--so maybe it was technically a different cover). I definitely remember reading a lengthy article with the same title.
» SFB says: We’ll put up a clarification on the original post, but just to emphasize: It’s entirely possible that any of the topics that didn’t show up on the cover may have showed up in the U.S. edition of the magazine elsewhere. In fact, it’s more than likely. The blurbs on the post are specifically about the covers. — Ernie @ SFB
lalondes asks: Regarding your tumbl-zine on Time's covers: don't you think it's a little silly to, well, judge a book by its cover? You seem to be suggesting that the cover in and of itself is the news, that this week's edition of Time contains only information about the benefits of anxiety to the total exclusion of news about Egypt. A difference in the image on the front page doesn't necessarily constitute a difference in the magazine's content or the quality of its journalism.
» SFB says: The issue in question here specifically deals with the covers, though, because that’s where the controversy began. This whole issue began with Glenn Greenwald and a number of other analysts criticizing a cover of Time, claiming it was evidence the magazine was dumbing down the news for American audiences. What we were trying to do was to show that, no, this is not the case, and we did that by analyzing a year’s worth of covers. We agree with you — the content on the inside is key. But Time is a magazine known for iconic covers, and those covers set the tone. That, ultimately, is the point we’re trying to make. — Ernie @ SFB
Telling, isn’t it?
Thought: Anxiety isn’t really good for you when it’s spread out over an entire country.
News is never a 9 to 5 job.
Wednesday evening, with the news that Apple visionary Steve Jobs had passed away from pancreatic cancer, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel (center) decided to stop the presses on the issue the staff had just finished earlier that afternoon. Staff members poured back into the TIME offices for an emergency edit meeting, which left us just over three hours to produce a new issue, many of us working on the very Apple devices that Jobs created.
Thursday, we’ll announce our latest issue featuring Jobs on the cover for the eighth time.
Tearing apart an entire magazine in three hours: A little grating. But the result was most assuredly worth it.
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