On Saturday morning, the New York Times put together a really amazing cover for their Sports section in order to announce that LeBron James was headed back to Cleveland to play for the Cavaliers. While other newspapers went over the top to make the announcement, the Times kept it simple when they did it. Very simple.
Instead of using a large photo or flashy graphics on their Sports cover, the Times opted to go with an understated cover that downplayed the news about LeBron. They ran a small box on the cover that featured all of the sports-related transactions that took place on Friday in it and surrounded the box with nothing but white space. It looked like this:
And believe it or not, someone at the Times actually got the idea to run that particular cover after seeing how the New York Post covered Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's wedding back in May. If you remember, the Post didn't dedicate 10 pages to the wedding after it happened or go too overboard when it came time to cover it. Instead, they opted to run this tiny article about it:
"The New York Post covered Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s wedding in very unlikely, un-tabloid fashion,” NYT Deputy Sports Editor Jason Stallman just revealed to Fast Company. “You think they’d go wild, but instead they did a small, brief, very mean-spirited and snarky announcement.”
So when it came time to cover the story about LeBron leaving the Miami Heat to move back to Cleveland, the Times decided to use the Post's coverage of the Kimye wedding as inspiration for their LeBron cover.
"By the end of the day [on Friday], against all the hype about the LeBron decision, we wanted to go in the totally opposite direction," Stallman said. "Most publications had big displays about LeBron, with huge photographs and headlines. We wanted the simplest, crudest possible representation of what happened."
So that's what the Times went with…and it worked. And we have the New York Post and the Kimye wedding to thank for it. Go figure.
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[via Fast Company]
