Photographs.
For me, photographs are the saving grace of magazines. Yes, the articles can be interesting, but overall, I would prefer to read a novel. Magazines are too busy and often hard to navigate. I couldn't tell you how many times I've opened a magazine in a waiting room and spent five minutes trying to find one of the cover stories.
Novels, though, don't have photographs. In the January 2011 Time magazine I picked up, the cover has a full-page portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi from Burma. I barely noticed the title "The Fighter" as an afterthought after being captivated by the portrait. Time, unlike fashion magazines, doesn't seem to airbrush their cover models. You can see Suu Kyi's wrinkles, her pores--individual eyelashes. Her eyes, so brown they're almost black, compelled me to read the article more than any head or deck ever could.
The rest of the magazine follows suit, complementing articles with photographs. Some are tragic, some are humorous, and all of them come with a high emotional impact. The goal of photojournalism is capturing the essence of the story in a picture. Taking that into account, I'd call this issue of Time a success, at least for the photographers.
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