Time well spent
09 August 2007. Inspired by some creative thinking at the top.
Some thoughtful work going on at Time Inc, where the Managing Editors of Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Essence all went with the company's Managing Ed to New Orleans in early May. As Time mag's Richard Stengel explains, they went there to talk, to listen and to report on what's been going on there since Katrina.
A major hurricane affects everything that makes up the city and it's life - news, sports, celebs, money, trade, and so on. To reflect this, and to further the depth of their coverage, Time, Inc asked these varied publications to report back to their readers on post-Katrina life in New Orleans.
So far, the results have been a little mixed - SI seem only to have reprinted someone else's story, whereas People en Espanol has a much bigger story about newborn Hispanics in the city. Essence has run a follow-up piece to one they ran in 2005, Fortune and Money's pieces have their own section on their websites, and perhaps unsurprisingly, strongest of all, Time ran the powerful cover reproduced above in the US this week (the rest of the world went with a less-impactful story about India), along with a debate on their website and a promised presidential debate in the city later on. Close up on the cover here. What's also nice is that it took them between the visit in May and now to make sure they were covering it in detail, which I think they did.
A few opportunities were missed - imagine if they had all splashed this on their covers, using each others mastheads, on the same week, and made it a special 'collect the set, read the most indepth, multi-faceted coverage ever'. I'd have bought them all. Also, perhaps too much leeway was given to the editors about how much or little they decided to feature what they saw in their mags, as suggested above.
But there's plenty to applaud here. The Guardian's G2 Goes To Glastonbury may have been fun, but Time Inc Goes To Katrina was a far more ambitious and potentially impactful idea. Much more of this from media empires, and I might just be won over.