Never before has Time magazine recognized a "person of the year" who was no longer living.
But Jamal Khashoggi’s face graces its cover this year, with the murdered Washington Post contributing columnist named one of the magazine’s examples of “The Guardians and the War on Truth.”
The standard for the annual award is not popularity or positivity, but rather influence. Impact. (It has, after all, gone to both Hitler and Stalin.)
And, as Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal explained in the section of his introductory essay about Khashoggi, it's "rare that a person's influence grows so immensely in death.