NEW YORK-
Newsweek offered different covers overseas and at home this week, featuring a close look at violence in Afghanistan for international readers called “Losing Afghanistan” while its domestic edition focused on photographer Annie Leibovitz for a story titled “My Life in Pictures.”
International editor Fareed Zakaria said the magazines often have different covers because they are tailored to different audiences overseas and at home. Domestically, Newsweek is a mass-circulation magazine with a broad reach while overseas it “is a somewhat more upmarket magazine for internationally minded people who travel a lot,” he said.
“Afghanistan is sort of the first victory in the war on terror. For that to be going badly is tremendous,” Zakaria said. International editions feature a photograph of what appears to be a Taliban fighter with a grenade launcher.
Domestic editions featured a photo of Leibovitz, one of the nation’s premier photographers, on the cover with several children.
Zakaria noted that the Afghanistan story was also promoted on the cover of the domestic editions, and that the magazine had negotiated an exclusive for Leibovitz’s new book.
Last year, Newsweek stirred up criticism over a different series of covers. In January 2005, the weekly newsmagazine featured a photo of an American flag in a garbage can in the Japanese-language edition that did not appear on the domestic or the international editions.
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