Businessweek has produced some excellent cover designs, but they are rightfully being pilloried right now for this current cover that is so over the top, misguided and overtly racist that I hardly know where to begin.
The thing that most strikes me about the cover is that the visual story the cover tells is is one that could never in this day and age be written with words inside the magazine.
A little context: The cover story inside the magazine is about a new housing boom in Phoenix. It’s a fairly non-controversial piece about home builders, house flippers, short sales, real estate agents and people who found themselves underwater with their mortgages. Apparently, things are on the rebound in Phoenix and prices are again rising after the housing bubble of a few years ago. But the cover makes no reference to the Phoenix housing market or players; it instead portrays a popular, but fallacious view of the housing bubble that blames the entire market meltdown on greedy, low-income home buyers who took advantage of the banks through fraudalent loan applications. It’s a storyline popular in certain circles that absolves the banking and loan industries and portrays them as victims with no responsibility for reckless behavior that crashed the economy.
While borrowers were not completely blameless, pinning the entire economic crisis on minority home buyers is a storyline that Businessweek could never have gotten away with, because the facts are simply not there. They have too much credibility to even try to go there with their writing.
But this is a story that was all too easy tell visually—which they did with this outrageous cover.
I really can’t comprehend how this cover made it past even one employee let alone past editors and publishers and all the way to print. But it did…and in the 21st century, not the 19th.
