Writing.The.World: The Year In People Covers (2019)

Sunday, January 19, 2020

The Year In People Covers (2019)

It's back! At the end of 2018 I did a year-in-review post with all of that year's People covers (see it here,) and I liked it so much I decided to do it again. (Yes, I'm obsessed. Not sure why.)

Anyway, the biggest category of cover stories this year was, once again and no surprise, the British royal family, with 12 main cover stories. (Four with Meghan alone, two of her with Harry, one with Kate, one of Kate alone, one of William and Kate, two with the "Fab Four" and one with the four royal children.) The next category was true crime, driven by the college admissions scandal. Felicity Huffman was featured once and Lori Loughlin was the main cover story three times. Reality TV was next, with one cover each for Bachelor Colton Underwood and Bachelorette Hannah Brown, as well as three HGTV covers, one each for Chip and Joanna Gaines, plus one of them together. There were two Dead Celebrity covers, one present (Luke Perry) and one past (JFK Jr.,) two illness covers (Alex Trebek and Selma Blair,) one Celebrity Wedding (Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth) and four Celebrity Baby covers (Andy Cohen, Harry & Meghan, Hoda Kotb and Tamron Hall.) Heartbreak was also a theme, with "heartbreaking lies" and "heartbreaking letter to Dad" (Meghan,) "Love After Heartbreak" (Reba McEntire, although Reba and her boyfriend had broken up before the end of the year,) "from Heartbreak to Happiness" (Tamron Hall,) "bouncing back from heartbreak" (Carrie Underwood) and "Happy After Heartbreak" (Adele.) Note that all of the above refers to main cover stories only. Note further that there were only two small sidebar headlines about women named Kardashian and not a single story, main or sidebar, about anyone named Trump.

Here are the 2019 covers:

January 7