( CNN ) -- When people ask me if there 's anything I miss about my old job at Newsweek , it 's an easy answer . Besides the amazingly talented colleagues I worked with there , I miss picking the cover . The cover is the calling card of any magazine , but it was particularly true for newsmagazines , since we put out a new issue every week and the range of subjects we had to choose from was so broad . In my era , as competition from more instant news on cable TV and the Web became ever more intense , it was also the one area where our slowpoke frequency could work in our favor . Make a smart call on the cover , and it stayed on newsstands and coffee tables for an entire week for readers to admire and discuss . It 's why , for instance , I still hear people talk about the cover story that I asked Fareed Zakaria , my former colleague at Newsweek ( and now at CNN ) , to write after 9/11 called `` Why They Hate Us . '' Of course , the opposite was also true . Make a dumb call and you had to live with it for a whole week . A crudely Photoshopped cover of Martha Stewart emerging from behind a curtain after her brief prison stint for obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators comes to mind . For decades , the cover was also how the fierce competition between Newsweek and Time was defined . In the 1960s , Newsweek became a `` hot book '' after three decades as a distant also-ran , thanks largely to its forward-looking covers on civil rights , Vietnam and the women 's movement ( not to mention Twiggy and LSD ) . In the 1970s , it was the cleverness of its cover designs as well as the depth of its reporting that wowed everyone who followed Newsweek 's coverage of Watergate . When both magazines put a young Bruce Springsteen on the cover in the same week in 1975 , it became conventional wisdom that we tried to copy each other . But the opposite was true : We were always looking to win the cover war , and we exulted when we did . One of those moments came for me the weekend that Princess Diana died in 1997 . We held the presses , threw out the issue we had just put to bed and came back into the office in the wee hours to publish a new one . I wanted a striking image for the cover and remembered a black and white photo of a short-haired Diana that had been taken by the fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier . One of my photo editors , a friend of Demarchelier 's , went to his apartment , woke him up and persuaded him to give us the negative . When I saw a wire service photo several hours later of Time 's cover , a standard news shot of Diana , I knew our issue would crush theirs on the newsstand . And it did , selling well over a million copies . Some weeks , like that one , the thrill was in `` crashing '' a cover at the last minute when a big story broke close to our Sunday deadline . John F. Kennedy Jr. would perish in a plane accident , or Saddam Hussein would get captured in Iraq , and we 'd switch covers and have the satisfaction of looking nimble and newsy on Monday . Details , however , could sometimes get overlooked in the rush . In 1990 , when I wrote a Sunday story on Nelson Mandela 's release from prison , we put the word `` Free ! '' on the cover . We never stopped to think that people would assume we were giving away the magazine for nothing . On slower news weeks , the satisfaction was in posing a pressing or provocative question about the economy , or race relations , or gay rights , or the fight to improve our health or save our schools . Or it was in deciding which icons deserved covers when they died , and what new cultural figures were worth highlighting on the way up . As proud as I was of putting a newly elected senator from Illinois named Barack Obama on our year-end cover in 2004 , I was just as proud of selecting Jon Stewart in 2003 . Then there was the sheer creative fun of coming up with the designs and words for the cover . I 'll never forget election night 2000 , when the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore went into overtime . We were closing a special issue , and we had prepared separate covers declaring each man the winner . But what to do now ? At about 3 in the morning , my art director walked into my office with an image that her staff had concocted of the two faces melded into one . `` That 's genius ! '' I said , and we put it on the cover with the headline `` The Winner Is ... '' Decades from now , when people have forgotten most of what they read inside the pages of Newsweek , they 'll still remember the visual impact of covers like that one . And those of us who were lucky enough to work there will remember those late nights , crowded in the editor 's office , competing to see who could come up with the best cover line . It sure was heaven while it lasted .
The cover is the calling card of any magazine , Whitaker says . The cover was also how the competition between Life and Time was defined . He recalls the striking image put together the day Princess Diana died . Another favorite : for the 2000 election results , a composite of Bush 's and Gore 's covers .