Editor's Note

Two stories Spin published in the last two months have offended some of our readers. It seemed only right to use this space to clear the air. Our Octover cover story on the return of Hole was not controversial, but the cover line drew an impassioned response from people who took issue with the highly charged language of the cover lines. The feeling was that by airing the worst accusations that have been made against Courtney Love, even if only to debunk them,Spin's cover validated those charges. What had once been the province of fringe publishers and filmmakers, and Internet crazies, was now being brought to the center of public discourse.

I can say with a clear conscience that the intent of the cover line was honorable: In a year when Love has been subjected to the worst kind of conspiracy-mongering and quite literal slander, it seemed ligitimate to promote the fact that the interview inside would include the first full-scale rebuttal to her detractors. As the lengthy story made clear, Love was deft and often brilliant in explaining the choices, personal and artistic, she had made with her life.

Where we came up short, I believe, was in failing to appreciate the extraordinary difficulty of her possition: She had not only lost a husband, the father of her child, to suicide, but was now forced to endure a seemingly endless barrage of insinuations that she was in some way to blame. Our cover line may have been journalistically sound, but it lacked in humanity. Addressing the Courtney- detractors in the context of a long piece was one thing; throwing the language on the cover, out of context, was just plain hurtful. I have apologized to her personally and would like to use this public forum to apologize to her publicly.

Similarly, and I promise this is not a trend, an image in out September fashion package provoked outrage from both people who deal with teen suicide and those who had lost friends and relatives to suicide. The image, a parody of sex play that showed a model engaging in autoerotic ashpyxiation, provoked relatively little comment (most people I spoke to understood that it was a sick joke, it was a joke nonetheless.) Still, the comment it did provoke, specially when followed by the reaction to our Octover cover, has led to a fair amount of soul- searching among the editors. I think we give ourselves both too much and too little credit: too much in that we assume our readers intuitively grasp and share our highly ironic, super-media-saturated sensibility; too little in that we fail to see the sometimes profound impact our stories and images have on readers, especially younger ones. We'll be more careful in the future.

Michael Hirschorn