The August 19th, 2019 TIME cover (Enough) is getting lots of free promotion on CNN and other left-leaning media outlets in the USA. The cover is in response to the tragic mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this past week. The cover lists the 253 cities that have been impacted by a mass shooting this year.
The striking cover, is a great example of 3 of my cover Rules:
Rule #6: Be Controversial
Rule #31: Radical Clarity
Rule #32: Timing Matters
Here’s what the Editor-in-Chief and CEO of TIME.had to say about the cover:
Last year, we put five survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on the cover of TIME, with the word ENOUGH emblazoned across the image. Determining the cover is always a team discussion, and in the course of it, some in our newsroom urged that we not use that word. How to determine what exactly is enough? Wasn’t it enough at Columbine? At Virginia Tech? At Fort Hood? Won’t it be enough when, sure as night follows day, the next massacre occurs?
We all have our measures of how obscenely normalized domestic terror has become. At TIME, one is how frequently we have felt compelled to devote our cover to the subject. In my own less than two years in this job, we’ve run seven of them, from the 2017 massacre at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 58 people to this spring’s murder of 50 worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In recent days, as the heartbreaking news from Gilroy to El Paso to Dayton swept across America, I thought about these covers as well as the hundreds of images from mass shootings we’ve published over the years. Terrified children who survived Sandy Hook walking single file to safety. Giant photographs of the dead at the prayer vigil for the victims at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The side-by-side graves of two brothers killed, among 11 altogether, at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Searing images and yet somehow forgotten by leaders with the power to effect change.
