Variety cover pits Yahoo CEO as failed savior

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been embattled. But religiously doomed savior?

That's seems to be what the illustration on the latest cover of Variety magazine is hinting. The scene depicts Mayer, buckling to her knees while carrying a giant wooden Y. "The End is Nigh," the cover says.

"CEO Marissa Mayer carries Yahoo’s weight on her shoulders," the words below read. "But with a sale on the horizon, her days are numbered — and there’s no resurrection in sight."

The story, written by the magazine's New York Digital Editor Todd Spangler, carries the headline "Yahoo’s False Prophet: How Marissa Mayer Failed to Turn the Company Around" and has another illustration credited to Marco Ventura showing Mayer in a Last Supper-esque setting.

The 3,100-plus word story details Mayer's failure to turnaround the company that she joined nearly four years ago. Rather than build up Yahoo's social media prowess, Spangler writes, Mayer focused on attempting to grow its search and build Yahoo's presence as a content provider.

Her legacy at Yahoo, he writes, "may be as the CEO who drove it into a fire sale."

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The Sunnyvale, Calif. Net media company, which continues to draw about 1 billion monthly visitors, is in the midst of a process to see what potential buyers might pay for Yahoo's core business, which includes assets such as its advertising and search business, Yahoo Sports and Tumblr. Prospective buyers in the second round of bidding include Verizon, a consortium that includes Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans' founder and owner of the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, who has offered to possibly help finance the bid, and others including several private-equity buyers.

“You’d think Verizon would be interested in it just for their traffic, and fire everybody in a classic strategic-acquirer move to take cost synergies out,” Brett Harriss, media and entertainment analyst at Gabelli & Co., is quoted as saying in the Variety story.

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Regardless, some observers took to Twitter questioning Variety's illustrations after the magazine's Co-Editor-in-Chief Andrew Wallenstein tweeted "a sneak peek at tomorrow's @Variety magazine cover story by @xpangler...Marissa Mayer like you've never seen her!"

In a story entitled "What is Variety trying to say with that Marissa Mayer cover?" Silicon Valley Business Journal Technology Reporter Jennifer Elias described the image as "likely to stir controversy and discussion."

Similarly, tech news site Gizmodo asked “Good God, What was Variety Thinking With This Marissa Mayer-as-Jesus Cover?" Its story went on to say that "It’s unclear what, exactly, Variety is going for here, beyond an exercise in poor taste. Mayer died for our sins? Is her red suit supposed to symbolize the blood she’s spilled while at Yahoo? Does the skull on the ground represent the poor Yahoo shareholders screwed over by bad management and poor decisions? Marissa Mayer is tired? Marissa Mayer’s Zamboni ride wasn’t worth it? Marissa Mayer couldn’t handle lifting the weight of a massive, billion-dollar company? We should pray for Marissa Mayer?"

"Running that cover illustration is Variety's own burden to bear," a Yahoo spokesperson told news site Business Insider.

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider