The first line of the editor's letter from Tina Hay in the new issue of The Penn Stater makes it clear: "This is not the January/February issue we had planned." And so it is not. The magazine staff had intended to run a cover story on "great concert memories at Penn State." Then the Sandusky story broke, the terra heaved, and great concert memories no longer seemed so great, at least not for the subsequent issue of The Penn Stater. No, that magazine could only have been about the Sandusky scandal. A "crisis," Hay called it.
Hay and her staff decided to devote the entire issue to the Sandusky crisis and recruited alumni and faculty to write essays. Unfortunately, you can't read the magazine online but you can get a sense of what's inside from the Penn Stater blog. What really stands out, though, is the "Our Darkest Days" cover, designed by Carole Otypka, the magazine's art director. It's black and heavy and stark. The letters that spell "Penn State" in the magazine's title have collapsed into a perfectly grim illustration of what the Sandusky scandal has done to the school. The ringfort around Happy Valley has been demolished. The scales have dropped. The Kool-Aid is overturned.
Here's an uncropped image of the cover (click to enlarge):
H/T: Sascha D.