A Magazine Back on a Roll
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/business/media/28stone.html
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: June 27, 2010
In its early days in the 1960s and '70s, Rolling Stone was a
chronicle of the counterculture where a generation of young people
came to find political coverage that spoke to their disaffection.
Then those baby boomers grew up, and Rolling Stone's voice seemed to fall flat.
But no more. Those same subversive tendencies that led Jann Wenner to
help found the magazine in 1967 were reawakened under the presidency
of George W. Bush. And now, rather unexpectedly, Mr. Wenner's
magazine is hitting its journalistic stride aggressively tackling
the American government on financial regulation, the environment and
the war in Afghanistan with a Democrat in the White House, one that
Mr. Wenner supported.
Mr. Wenner said Rolling Stone's more antagonistic tack is, in a
sense, a way of shaking off the cultural complacency many liberals
felt in the 1990s.
"Everything was kind of hunky-dory under Clinton," Mr. Wenner said in
a telephone interview last week. "With Bush, between 9/11 and his
response to it, he put the country in pretty serious danger. And that
kind of got our juices going again."
Rolling Stone's explosive piece "The Runaway General," which last
week brought a disgraceful end to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's
career, was just the latest in a string of articles resonating in the
nation's corridors of power.
Its excoriating takedown of Goldman Sachs last summer was one of the
most provocative and widely debated pieces of journalism to come out
of the financial crisis. In the article, the writer Matt Taibbi
described the investment bank as "a great vampire squid wrapped
around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel
into anything that smells like money."
And this month, the magazine published a critical take on the Obama
administration's regulation of the oil industry, which started a
firestorm on cable news and in the blogosphere. (The current issue
contains a follow-up on BP's plans to drill in the Arctic.)
Mr. Wenner said he had been emboldened by what he described as a
sense of disappointment over Mr. Obama's first 18 months in office.
"I'm for Obama, but I think he needs to make some course
corrections," Mr. Wenner said. The unforgiving and hard-nosed
publisher then mustered about as much sympathy as he could and added,
"I realize he's got a tough job."
As many of his peers in the magazine world have gathered moss, Mr.
Wenner has pushed Rolling Stone back uphill. While its single copy
sales for the first three months of 2010 were down slightly from
2009, it has attracted enormous attention for its political coverage
and consistently draws a young readership, with an average age of 30.
Over all, the biweekly magazine's circulation has grown to about 1.5
million copies an issue from about 1.4 million in 2008.
More unusually, the masthead of the magazine, which has been known to
churn through editors under Mr. Wenner, has also been remarkably
stable for the last several years. Will Dana, the managing editor,
has held that position since 2005. Mr. Dana's predecessor, Ed
Needham, quit after being on the job three years.
Under Mr. Dana, the magazine has put more of its resources into
longer profiles and investigative pieces.
"This is what we do," Mr. Dana said. "We let our reporters run."
Rolling Stone's success also could be, in part, a function of its
publishing schedule. Many newsweeklies have faltered and lost their
impact on shaping the national conversation, but as a biweekly
Rolling Stone has thrived in defiance of a digital age in which
articles are supposed to appear then vanish within hours.
"In a way the advantage almost goes to monthlies or biweeklies in
that we don't chase the previous week," said Graydon Carter, the
editor of Vanity Fair. "We sort of describe and cover our own worlds
as we see them. And you have the time and the space to spread out a
story and go after it in a deeper way."
Vanity Fair has published its share of bombshells in recent years,
the most stunning being its revelation of the identify of the
Watergate source known as Deep Throat. The magazine reported in 2005
that W. Mark Felt, a top-ranking F.B.I. official during the Nixon
administration, was the source for The Washington Post as it exposed
the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Carter says biweekly publications have the best of both worlds:
they can respond nimbly to the news and take their time on longer
enterprise pieces.
"Rolling Stone sort of owns even a better schedule being fortnightly,
being not weekly, and not monthly. And they've had a hell of a run
the last few weeks," he said.
Of course, Rolling Stone is something of an anomaly among its peers
in national affairs reporting because it had always pushed against
the limits of objective journalism. It was the longtime home of
Hunter S. Thompson.
Some close to General McChrystal have grumbled anonymously to
newspapers that the critical comments the general and his aides
uttered in front of the Rolling Stone reporter were off the record.
The reporter, Michael Hastings, has denied that, saying that few
ground rules were set for his interactions with the general.
One side-effect of the McChrystal piece could be to make magazines
rethink what a Northwestern journalism professor, Charles Whitaker,
described as a dumbing down of coverage.
"I think it's encouraging for writers and editors because they can
say we can still have impact," Mr. Whitaker said. "We don't have to
pander so much to an audience with pop culture stories. We can
continue to do these kinds of stories, which are expensive and hard to report."
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McChrystal article is right up Rolling Stone's alley
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-rolling-stone-20100624,0,4762418.story
The magazine's hard-hitting reporting stems from its tradition of
launching journalists to hang out with their subjects for long
periods of time and gaining access few other journalists can obtain.
By Geraldine Baum
June 23, 2010
For more than four decades, Rolling Stone magazine has periodically
rocked American culture and politics and not just with its stories
about music.
Today its business model has been upended by the Internet. But one of
the mainstays of its journalism, the up-close and personal account
perfected by following rock bands across the world, continues to make waves.
The article that led to the resignation of Army Gen. Stanley A.
McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, is part
of its tradition of launching journalists to hang out with their
subjects for long periods of time talking and traveling with them,
and gaining access few other journalists can obtain. In the case of
the late iconoclastic writer Hunter S. Thompson, it occasionally
meant sharing long evenings of drugs and drinks with them.
"This piece about the general is right in character for Rolling
Stone," said Simon Dumenco, media writer for Advertising Age. "There
have been pieces of that kind of intensity and all-access really
pretty frequently."
Which makes it all the more mysterious why McChrystal chose to cozy
up to a magazine that strove to maintain a countercultural DNA and
hard-hitting reputation. Some suggest it may be a reflection of his
boomer status and respect for an old brand. Others remain baffled
The magazine made a mark with Thompson's coverage of Richard Nixon,
Timothy Crouse's reporting on reporters on the campaign trail as well
as with political pieces by William Greider and Carl Bernstein. It
pioneered so-called literary nonfiction, including Tom Wolfe's
accounts of the early space program that became "The Right Stuff."
More recently it published Matt Taibbi's hard-hitting coverage of
financial giant Goldman Sachs.
Over the years the magazine staff has stuck to the mission of its
founding editor Jann Wenner: to penetrate American culture and politics.
"Jann's passion for politics goes way back," said Robert Wallace, a
former managing editor. "Jann deserves the credit for staying the
course. A lot of magazines have lost their core mission and beliefs.
Jann knew what he wanted and still knows."
Wenner, who is now 64, founded the magazine in 1967 out of ragtag
offices in San Francisco. He was, by all accounts, the quintessential
fan obsessed with the characters at the core of the music counterculture.
In the mid-1970s Wenner moved the offices of Rolling Stone to
Manhattan. The magazine gained readers, cash and power and also
began changing to follow its aging demographic, Dumenco said.
Wenner now also owns Men's Journal and US Weekly, a popular tabloid
that is said to bring in the profits that fuels his privately held
media company.
While the McChrystal story reasserts Rolling Stone's role in
high-impact journalism, it is unlikely to make it any easier for the
magazine to make money online.
In fact, the gist of the story had already leaked out to other
websites before Rolling Stone had posted it.
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