Wednesday's Weird Web Thievery: Epic Editorial Fail from Time.

I have just been shown a great Facebook page full of very clever observations.
http://www.facebook.com/skullandbonesnz
Head over there and LIKE them, you won't regret it.

Whilst browsing their Facebook page I came across this image.

Right about now you might be asking yourself is this for real.

Quite unsurprisingly it is very real, and perfectly illustrates how much influence the media has over the control of the "news".

You can take a look at the official TIME site < http://www.time.com/time/magazine > , and right there on the front of the site is this photo (without the captions of course). This set of covers comes from the December 5, 2011 | Vol. 178 No. 22 Edition, which is just under a week away. That is quite surprising in itself. I always thought that TIME Magazine was quite up to the minute, and the content was reactionary to current events, not a magazine constructed weeks in advance of it's release.

A question I have is what is so wrong with keeping the same article about the Egyptian Revolution and photo as the cover on the US Edition?
Were they afraid that people would confuse the photo as one not from Egypt but from one of the Occupy protests around the US?

With the internet it has become so easy to share this kind of position with everyone. This means that even small editorial decisions can have a major impact. For whatever reason the US Edition has a different cover than the other editions, and commentators and bloggers alike are left wondering why this is.