Cover Trail

How the cover gets made

① “The cover story is on the correlation between the stock market and oil prices, which can be bad in terms of an economic recovery.”

“Why’s it bad?”

“Because when oil prices go down, so does the market.”

“We could run a fever-line chart with two lines. Both lines could be going downward. And then a caption could say, ‘Look, they’re correlated—wow!’ ”

“That doesn’t sound very sexy.”

② “A businessman, representing the stock market, and an oil drum, which represents—stay with me— oil prices, in some kind of human-on-inanimate-object codependent romantic relationship.”

“That’s very strange. It also completely diminishes the complexity of the story. But it’s sexier.”

“One out of three. Sounds like a win!”