Fortune’s Schlocky Tim Cook Cover

Speaking of the Tim Cook story by Adam Lashinsky — Fortune’s cover “photo” is just embarrassingly bad. I put “photo” in quotes because it’s so Photoshopped it’s more illustration than photograph. Neither Apple nor Cook himself participated in Lashinsky’s article, and if Cook didn’t even talk to him, then he certainly wasn’t going to pose for a cover shoot. I sympathize with the dilemma this posed for Fortune’s editors. But they should have commissioned an actual illustration or used a photo of Cook on stage at a recent product announcement.

What they came up with — cropping Cook’s head from the photo on his bio page at Apple.com, and putting it on someone else’s body in a contrived pose — isn’t just goofy-looking, but I’d say downright disingenuous. To the casual observer, it looks like a cover photo that Cook posed for, when in fact he didn’t participate in any aspect of the story.

★ Friday, 25 May 2012