The Magazine Cover Story, Endangered and Essential

The cover story is the most expensive sentence a magazine ever writes. It is the feature an issue is built around, the reason a reader picks the publication off a rack or taps it open on a phone, and the piece an editor defends in budget meetings months before anyone reports a word. Its history tracks the history of magazines themselves, from the eighteenth-century idea of a publication as a storehouse of information to the print-to-digital transition that has reshaped the whole industry. Understanding how a cover story comes to be means following it through three rooms: the commissioning meeting where it is assigned, the photo shoot where it is made visible, and the sales conversation where it is monetized. Each room has its own logic, and the tensions between them explain both the form's endurance and its fragility. This cover story Tradition deserves that close a look. For related coverage, see Why Thomas Merton Still Speaks to a Distracted Age.

This excerpt comes from the named source. Read the original for the full reporting.