Categories: OLD Media Moves

Bloomberg Businessweek cover is subversive genius

John Brownlee of Fast Company examines the thinking behind Bloomberg Businessweek‘s last cover of Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Brownlee writes, “This isn’t the first Businessweek cover that has made Tim Cook look like an idiot. Just last year, Businessweek put Cook on the cover with the tagline ‘What Us Worry?’, drawing a parallel between the Apple CEO and Mad Magazine‘s gap-toothed buffoon of a mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.

“I asked Businessweek Creative Director Robert Vargas if the intention was to send a message to readers about Tim Cook’s credentials (or lack thereof) by choosing these specific colors and typeface for the cover. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Vargas stuck with Bloomberg’s official story that the only intent was make Tim Cook look like a happy, fun-loving CEO.

“‘We were really happy with the spirit of the cover photo, and how it’s the antithesis of the formality and seriousness you might expect from a portrait of a powerful CEO,’ Vargas told me in an email. ‘We found and experimented with the font Learning Curve’– we thought the playfulness of it made a great match and enhanced the surprise.’

“So maybe it was unintentionally genius. Businessweek has had its share of horrible covers over the years, but in this case, horrible is good.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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