It was only a matter of time, right? Renegade Collective magazine has broken the mould in print media by using a celebrity-free Instagram snap as the magazine’s front cover for Issue 23. “To my knowledge, we are Australia’s first major glossy magazine that has ever put an Instagram image on the cover,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Lisa Messenger, said.
The decision has been “a long time coming”, with Lisa explaining that she needed to prioritise her readers and the entrepreneurial magazine’s ethos above what sells well. “I have a love-hate relationship with placing celebrities on the cover,” she said.
“We know they do sell magazines but deep in my heart, I also know The Collective is about all people and that most of the people we interview are very much cover worthy because of who they are and what they are doing; they just don’t always have the public profile to match it,” she said in a press release.
Lisa wound up choosing a snap belonging to husband-and-wife duo Murad and Nataly Osmann, the masterminds behind the #FollowMeTo project. “I was instantly in love,” Lisa explained of the decision. “I knew in that moment ‘this is it’ and suddenly nothing else felt right.”
The #FollowMeTo pair have over 2.8 million Instagram followers and fans of their incredible travel shots, which see one person leading another, with their back turned to the camera, into an adventurous, serene, or captivating destination.
The move of combining digital with traditional media outlets is only growing, and we feel that this Instagram cover thing could start a new trend. It’s a lot cheaper (we imagine) and easier to manage than an all-day cover shoot, after all!
Renegade Collective is on sale from today, Monday 6.
