National Geographic magazine reaches 49 million print and digital readers in 33 languages worldwide.
For the June 2019 issue, the English edition featured an investigative piece titled "Wildlife Tourism," which exposed the extreme animal suffering behind many wildlife tourism activities around the world.
Most of the international-language editions featured this story on their covers, including China, a country which has no national laws on captive-animal welfare and was highlighted in the investigation.
The edition in Thailand, another key country in the piece, published an alternate cover image that referenced Thai elephants.
The Arabic, Czech, Nordic, and Serbian editions used a cover image of the macaque performing with a parasol. The German edition opted for an illustration to represent the complicated relationship between animals and humans, while Poland went for an image of a performing chimpanzee.
A few editions published the story but did not use it as a cover. The Bulgaria edition used the future of cities cover from April and the Netherlands and Taiwan editions used marine plastic stories for this month.
Local cover stories were used in the Italy, Portugal, and Spain editions. Italy featured a piece on the 2016 World Press Photo winner Massimo Sestini, who documented a boat rescue and went on to cover the lives of some of the individuals on that boat. Portugal and Spain featured the restoration of Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral in Spain.
See below for a round-up of our covers from across the globe featuring an array of topics.
