Journalism Critics Question Philadelphia Daily News Cover

They're tut-tutting the paper for putting both sex slavery and Sexy Singles on the front page today.

Oh, yeah, we should probably make note of this Daily News cover today. The paper has a 2,700-word piece on sex slavery in Philadelphia. A lot of it is harrowing — a pimp named King Kobra would “send the young women who worked for him into the Gallery at Market East to try to recruit new girls,” Morgan Zalot writes — and yet it has to share space on the cover with Sexy Singles. With Sexy Singles Day 2: The Swimsuit Edition. There’s not even a Monkee in it this year!

The cover is so strange-looking it caught the eye of Poynter, the journalism school, and media critic Jim Romenesko. “Do they not have women editors there?” a reader asks him, to which the answer is yes.

Zalot tweeted the cover decision was “far above my pay grade.” The upside: Perhaps her story will get read a lot more due to how much people are scratching their heads about the weird juxtaposition on the cover.