The magazine took serious precautions to protect the image and story

Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover reveal on Monday made perhaps the biggest splash on the Internet since stepdaughter Kim Kardashian “broke the Internet” with another surprising cover. How did the magazine protect such a newsy photo, story and cover line (“Call me Caitlyn”) from getting out in the age of hackers and leakers?


The publication did not take the task lightly. According to Mashable, Vanity Fair had been in negotiations with Jenner’s camp since January, and prevented anyone on the scene of the photo shoot from leaking information by hiring security guards and banning cell phones. Staffers apparently worked on the entire story and cover on one computer (without an Internet connection), saving files on a thumb drive and deleting them from the computer at the end of each day. When it was time to go to press, the files were hand delivered to the printers.