Why I don't buy the argument for magazine cover photo retouching

One of the most interesting issues that has cropped up in recent years has been the debate over the ethics of airbrushing and retouching the artwork and photos that appear on the cover of a magazine.

I've been watching the debate with great anticipation, because I feel that it's a bit of a make-or-break issue for magazine publishing. I don't believe too much will change in the short-term, but I do believe it will establish more concrete boundaries as to what is and isn't acceptable in terms of modifying artwork.

Many magazines have come under fire for choosing to heavily modify their cover subjects, who are usually celebrities: Vogue, Glamour, Marie Claire, InStyle, Shape and even Self (irony of ironies!) have all been called out for a gratutious "we'll fix it in post [-production]" attitude.

Heading the effort is snarky women's blog Jezebel, whose "Photoshop of Horrors" series documents various magazine efforts to, well, hide the truth.

But how true should the truth be in a women's interest or fashion magazine?

The criticism grew so great for a recent Self cover depicting Kelly Clarkson as thinner than she really is -- a big deal, since part of Clarkson's image is the rags-to-riches theme that she's an average (and average-sized) girl who made it big based on that uniquely American potion of talent, merit and moxie -- that the magazine's editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger felt the need to address the issue in a blog post on the mag's web site.

Here are some highlights from her lengthy response:

Pictures are meant to tell a story, express a feeling, convey an emotion or capture a moment. Portraits like the one we take each month for the cover of SELF are not supposed to be unedited or a true-to-life snapshot.

[...]

Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best. Did we publish an act of fiction? No.

[...]

This is art, creativity and collaboration. It's not, as in a news photograph, journalism. It is, however, meant to inspire women to want to be their best. That is the point.

[...]

Kelly says she doesn't care what people think of her weight. So we say: That is the role model for the rest of us.

[...]

Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and be confident in every shot, in every moment. Because the truest beauty is the kind that comes from within.

If I may be so bold: does this not reek of excuses?

Allow me to address these points individually:

• Danziger first defends the edits on their face by declaring that Self isn't supposed to be "true-to-life." Somewhat hypocritical given the magazine's title, but the most legitimate point in defending this practice for magazines.
  
  
• But then she backtracks: We only did it to make her look "her personal best." That's impossible, because there's no way of reproducing a Photoshop job in real life. Her skin will not get unblemished. Her hips will not thin the way you've crafted them. Her teeth will not whiten so evenly. There's nothing personal about it.
  
  
• Worse, that reason allows that the magazine assumes responsibility for Clarkson's physical appearance. Last time I checked, she's a public figure -- meaning she (and her publicist) are the ones in control of how she appears in public. That's the cost of being famous. That's your primary job: representing yourself. If she's not at her "personal best" at the time of the shoot, is it really your job as a publisher to pick up the pieces? (And, if you're into back-door dealing, is it really fair for a publicist to withhold their client because she can't manage her own image?)
  
  
• By Self allowing image edits on Clarkson's figure under the excuse of Clarkson "looking her personal best," it allows that the magazine is now a part of Clarkson's public relations team. A thin line that all magazines straddle to be sure, but not something I'd readily admit to as an editor.
  
  
• Danziger then tries to compare the edits to journalism. No one's criticizing their work based on the accuracy guidelines for war photos from Iraq. To me, Danziger is defending her decision on the basis of an issue that has not been legitimately raised.
  
  
• Danziger then admits that Clarkson doesn't care, and uses that as an excuse to alter the photo. Again, hypocritical -- especially in light of the "personal best" reason (so we're kissing up to her!) and the following one, below.
  
  
• Danziger finishes with a dashed off, clichéd line about how "true beauty" comes "from within." Besides the fact that the phrase rings empty, it still flies in the face of the effort, time and budget spent to modify Clarkson's photograph.

Jezebel's criticism is based in the implication of an ethical boundary that has been crossed: women should not be fooled into thinking or idolizing something that is not possible in the physical world, and anything less than 99% truth is ethically reprehensible.

But it's not the ethical issue of representing women on covers for readers to look up to that bothers me the most. What's really aggravating is that no publishing professional has owned up to the real reason: a better-looking magazine sells more on the newsstand.

(And the unspoken inference: rightly or wrongly, the majority of people find thinner women more attractive. And "more attractive" is always a way to sell more magazines.)

Why is it so hard to just respond to criticism that way? If the decision is made not on the basis of ethics or representation or idealistic idolatry among readership, why not defend it on that ground?

(Certainly no one's holding Danziger's feet to the flames for mere color-correction.)

For sure, it's unfair that Danziger is being singled out in this post (and others) for her response. Self is hardly the worst offender of this practice. But her attempt to defend herself just fell flat to me.

The calling card of most general interest magazines is not their hard-hitting articles or their ethical rigidity. It's their ability to entertain. They are vehicles for leisure, and they convey that spirit through layout and design.

A magazine without that isn't a magazine at all, the way I see it. And at the end of the day, magazine publishing is a business. Period.

So why defend it any other way?

Update: Looks like Self entertainment assistant Ashley Mateo gets it. Amid meaningless fluff, she writes:

"Magazines don't hide the fact that they're always trying to sell issues--and to sell copies, you need to appeal to readers with the best writing and the best images possible."

Perhaps the corner office is too insulating?

Update 2: Jezebel's Margaret posted her own analysis.

If You're In Charge Of Designing A Publication's Website, Read This Post.

A wonderfully talented colleague of mine passed along this interview with the web designer for Monocle, a fabulous internationally-minded magazine that has embraced the web with zeal. In it, the designer, Dan Hill, shows the sketches and thinking behind a magazine designing for the web.

(It's a long read, but worth every inch -- if you're the impatient type, skip to where the first images of the home page begin.)

One thought in particular showed how Monocle sets itself apart from the, ahem, bigger publishing houses in the U.S.:

Thus we were doing the opposite of what most magazine-driven brands when they turn to the internet (often as an afterthought). The obvious choice is to plonk all the magazine editorial online, and augment with a few editors' blogs and such-like. At first glance, we were effectively letting the print material reside where it is best experienced - in the tactile format of the magazine - and instead exploring new facets of the brand with a broadcast-led website. But wanting to have our cake and eat it, the magazine material is there too, just reformatted for the web and immersed in a new navigational framework, appropriate to its new context.

Afterward follows diagrams and explanations: why a certain layout, why certain fonts, why certain choices and under what kind of constraints instituted by the better-known print product:

I inherited a fairly full worked through corporate identity, with typeface choice (generally, Plantin, Helvetica Neue, and Hoefler + Frere-Jones's Strasse from Numbers; all quite beautiful), a 4-way colour-scheme, a strong grid-based structure, and all the small detail elements - end marks, pull quote styles, maps, oldstyle numerals, a Monocle mark as well as typographic treatment of the logo, and so on - that the architecture of a magazine supplies. Further, the identity extended into paper bookmarks, envelopes, letterheads, and the nicest cardboard DVD wallets I’ve ever seen.

The challenge was to translate all that for the internet - something I've done many times before, working with the music or broadcast industries, but I'd never done with a monthly magazine.

The same goes for generating content for the web. So many magazines use their website as an incomplete content dump, never really offering their backlog of content but still making it seem like it's a seriously complex site. Monocle went the other way:

In terms of rhythm of updates, we deliberately decided less is more, and flying in the face of conventional wisdom (if you can have wisdom in a medium only a decade old) we produced editorial at a steady rate - essentially a well-made film or two per week - rather than bombarding the user with content. Deciding to filter, reflect and craft rather than immerse the user in a constant flow of data in lieu of information. Again, this was difficult for some to get their heads around, and we certainly have aspirations to increase the frequency to include a snappy daily bulletin, but this sense of quiet calm exuding from Monocle was another important statement: that you don’t have to clutter websites with every possible bit of information you can. And that - particularly for the busy people that enjoy Monocle - information overload is not something we wished to contribute to.

And, of course, making stylistic choices that convey the greater message and brand of the publication:

Visually, we wanted to make something that didn't ape current design tropes - the boring, over-used and essentially art-less 'web 2.0 look' of bright palletes, gradient fills and rounded corners - but had a more classical view, as befitting something a little more grown up. Richard Spencer Powell said the magazine design draws from modernism, of course (especially North and Mittel European heritage) but also looks further back into the early 20thC, and beyond the simple serifs and vogue for ornamentation, but look at the engravings, section headers, cartographic styles etc.

So the last thing we needed was a bevelled/shaded button style in yellow or fuscia.

And, finally, the hot topic of the moment -- how to successfully engage readers with user-generated content like comments and the like (the approach may surprise you):

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn't need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment - whether that's blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online - with clean, permanent URL structures - thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites. At some point, we could begin to aggregate responses to Monocle editorial, Technorati-style, perhaps...overall, this seemed a more mature approach to handling this brand, and the increasingly sophisticated environment online. It's meant we don't have to carry moderation costs, which I knew could be expensive, yet still trigger conversation. Towards the end of the year, a site described Monocle as "the most blogged about magazine", so part of that strategy would seem to be working.

I think there are some incredibly valuable lessons to be had here, and all designers for the web ought to be thinking about these issues in depth. Given recent discussion on this blog, Mark Potts and Avenue A | Razorfish, I'm looking at you with a friendly gaze; but I'm also looking at every online editor and the higher-ups that constrain their efforts at Condé Nast, Hearst, Time, Hachette, Meredith, Rodale, and so forth.

Because honestly: I know The New Yorker site won the 2008 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, but let's be honest -- can sites like that (clean content dumps with unimaginative architecture) and the insanely cluttered sites of men.style.com or even New York magazine's site really hold a candle to the clean lines, forward-thinking, mature site of Monocle?

I don't think so.

To me, they just look three steps behind.

Why Aren't Magazines Themselves On The Web? A Letter To Publishers.

Every time I visit a magazine's website, I'm disappointed.

Why?

Because I don't get the same experience that I appreciate getting as a reader of the print publication.

Normally, that's fine. The success of a magazine's website isn't to emulate the print publication. It can't, too, since it's generally accepted that magazines can't be as easily replaced as newspapers in an online format.

So why am I disappointed, then?

Because most magazines' websites are cluttered. Obscenely so. Ads scream at you "above the fold" and keep on screaming until the fifth or sixth scroll down. Featured articles are rarely featured. Less-than-quality content is given the same weight as the cover story. And for God's sake, I don't even know where I am on this damn website.

Get what I'm saying? Magazine websites don't feature their content the way they do in the printed format. And that is what I think makes a magazine so enjoyable to read in the first place.

I understand that most big-time publishers haven't put "enough resources" (as their web editors might say under their collective breath) toward the development of the online platform. They pay for a template, a content management system, and a couple peoples' salaries to keep the thing going. The focus is still on the moneymaker -- the printed magazine. And I get that.

But they're hurting themselves so very much.

A website is the online face of the magazine. For most, it looks as if that face has way, way too much makeup. The problem with this is, despite a lack of significant ad revenue, there are on average five times as many readers online as there are for the printed publication. Five times as many eyeballs -- which means a vast majority who don't subscribe to the site (there is, on average, about 10-20 percent overlap with the printed publication). And what do these readers have to greet them?

An information overload, a vague identity and no reason to subscribe. When online subscriptions cost the publisher the least amount of money, what benefit is that, exactly?

Let's take an example of a magazine I read regularly: New York, a weekly publication.

The magazine serves a distinct purpose as a "in-the-know" magazine for a wide swath of audience living in the New York area. It's service-y, it's big-J journalism-y, it's trashy, it's classy.

In the printed pages, it's easy to see why New York wins all the National Magazine Awards. In terms of stories, the writing's usually top-notch, and when it isn't, they make the best they can of it with great art or infographics. In terms of design, the typography is fantastic, the use of white space is daring and it's distinctive. On the whole, it just drips the New York identity. Which it's supposed to.

But on the web -- even though it's come a long way recently -- it's a complete overload. The typography is there -- unusual for most magazines -- but there's no white space in sight. Ads fight for stories. The cover stories are not always the featured story -- and New York offers almost all of its content free on the web (most national magazines do not). It obliterates my senses -- in a bad way.

I like the New York magazine website, but I much prefer it on my RSS reader. That way, I don't have socialites and Diane Von Furstenberg ads fighting for eyeball attention with the latest story about John McCain. About the only part of the website I can stomach for long is the restaurant reviews, which aren't littered with as much distraction. The Intelligencer blog is wonderful, but it can't hold my eye too long before the ads and other stories overcome my attention.

The worst part about this is that, compared to other national and regional magazines, New York's website is fairly ahead of the game. About the only websites it can't compete with in terms of sheer usefulness are tech-centric magazines, whose audience is a natural transition from print to web (and in fact, they probably fight to move online readers to the printed publication and not the other way around).

But take a look at some national magazine websites: Vogue. InStyle. O, The Oprah Magazine. Elle. Esquire. The list goes on. On them all, their identities are not distinct. Your eyeball is having a hard time adjusting with each passing second. And if you already have something in mind to find, forget it. Have you ever tried to find a specific piece of content on the GQ website? It's like pulling your own teeth with a skinny striped silk-knit tie, sans anesthesia. Jesus.

Magazines, it seems, have given up on the idea that they can drive traffic from the website to the printed publication. And I think that's baloney -- so long as bigwigs give up the notion that such migration will only happen if people will come from the website to the printed publication for the exact same reason.

The website serves a purpose. The magazine also serves a purpose. They should be distinct; but they shouldn't be so different that the other wouldn't be attractive to read. In other words, we should think less in an "either/or" fashion and more in a "primary/secondary." Some of our readers are first printed edition readers, than online edition readers. Some are the opposite.

Many of our most celebrated national magazines have spent years and incalculable amounts of money marketing and positioning the mission of their magazine portfolio. Why aren't we doing the same for each publication's website?

For all of the labyrinthine webpages that magazine websites have, they sure can't manage their own content well. It's embarrassing. Really, they're ignoring the lessons they spent a century figuring out: how to draw and direct the eye with typography. How to keep it trained on something with white space. How to exude identity with design cues and pacing. Online, there is none of this. About the only thing that's the same is the writing, and I bet someone could make an argument that the online-exclusive content pales in comparison to the editorial triumph that the printed version has.

To bring it back to New York with a recent example: Why wasn't a nude Lindsay Lohan-as-Marilyn Monroe front and center for the last week and a half? She's your big moneymaker, right? The placement of her 100-by-200 pixels link was admirable, but the vast majority of the website's readers came for her recently. It took me two extra clicks to get to Lindsay, and when I got there, there was nothing on that page to take me elsewhere once I was done browsing the photo shoot. The original link that I described above should have been the one used to reap leftover traffic once the weekly switches content; not as the primary directive.

I'm the reader. Don't make me work.

Sure, magazine websites are still in their infancy. But I'd say that they're really in their teenage years -- misdirected, trying to be someone (everyone) else, and ignoring their own notable qualities.