Newswise — Carolyn Kitch is a professor of journalism at Temple University's School of Media and Communication. For 11 years, she was a magazine editor and writer in New York City, holding staff positions at McCall's and Good Housekeeping.
Kitch says the Rolling Stone cover design is recognizable to its readership - but not in the way we might expect.
"The first thing that strikes me about this cover is how similar the aesthetic is to not only the 'rock-star image,' but, quite specifically, the dead rock-star image. This cover looks like the typical magazine cover treatment, on Rolling Stone and other magazines, that we would expect, indeed we would 'recognize,' when a famous young star dies unexpectedly. The broader connotation is that of tragedy," she says.
But what troubles Kitch even more is the coverline Rolling Stone uses to tease the story inside: "How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by his Family, Fell into Radical Islam and Became a Monster."
"That is a standard -- again, recognizable -- storyline, the fall-from-grace story: How could it be that this promising young man was led astray? Interestingly, that is also the plotline for the story of the young man who is on the cover of People magazine this week: Cory Monteith, the Glee star who died of a drug overdose a few days ago. It is a typical narrative template for the dead-rock-star story -- but in the case of the Rolling Stone coverline, it narratively enfolds Tsarnaev himself within the tragedy. This, to me, is more troubling than the use of the photograph."
Kitch notes that this same image has appeared elsewhere in journalism, but did not elicit the same response.
"The strong, negative reaction to this reminds us of the visual power of magazine covers, the visual aesthetic -- which includes the famous logo -- whose meaning we 'recognize' because it conjures up collective memory. The comparisons to Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, for instance, draw on a broader, iconic cultural memory, since many present-day readers can't, themselves, actually remember that time period (let alone those particular issues of the magazine)," she says. "It makes Tsarnaev a victim within the mythology, and that reframing of him, alongside a picture that people 'recognize' as the rock star, was a terrible misstep here. I can't imagine that Rolling Stone anticipated this response."
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