Posted on 09/17/2017 7:26:03 PM PDT by Rebelbase
From a loft in San Francisco in 1967, a 21-year-old named Jann S. Wenner started a magazine that would become the counterculture bible for baby boomers. Rolling Stone defined cool, cultivated literary icons and produced star-making covers that were such coveted real estate they inspired a song.
But the headwinds buffeting the publishing industry, and some costly strategic missteps, have steadily taken a financial toll on Rolling Stone, and a botched story three years ago about an unproven gang rape at the University of Virginia badly bruised the magazine’s journalistic reputation.
And so, after a half-century reign that propelled him into the realm of the rock stars and celebrities who graced his covers, Mr. Wenner is putting his company’s controlling stake in Rolling Stone up for sale, relinquishing his hold on a publication he has led since its founding.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"Unproven" is the new "fictitious".
Oh well, bye. Never bought it or read it.
I’m 67 , never, ever even picked up a copy of that liberal trash.
I wonder how Sabrina Rubin Erdely is doing? Her website still touts her brilliant career, mentions every article she ever wrote except the UVA phantom gang rape.
They put AL Gore’s boner on the cover. You could practically make out the head through his pants.
Tacky!
Angus Young probably agrees with that review. I don't think he ever envisioned AC/DC to be anything more than a bar band with songs you could drink to. And the calculated stupidity has made him very wealthy over the years.
It’s sort of amazing that Rolling Stone lasted as long as it did, and I think it’s numbers were still respectable 7 or 8 years ago. The last decade has been rough for them.
If you are a “rock n roll” magazine, you have to cover youth culture. At the same time, youth culture today has nothing to do with rock and roll, and Millenials are not buying magazines.
They probably could plug along for a few more years writing cover stories on Springsteen and the next Stones retirement tour, but eventually your audience is literally going to die.
I still try to stay somewhat in touch with “modern” music, so I would get annoyed when I was a subscriber when they spent so many pages on, like, Led freakin’ Zeppelin.
At the same time, with new acts, you don’t get the same access as they used to get. So you are writing a story on - I dunno - Justin Bieber based on a two hour interview in a hotel conference room.
The Almost Famous says of touring and traveling with an act are dead and gone. No publicist in his or her right mind would allow that.
Congratulations.
You just acquired millions in debt to create Pitchfork in a world that already has Pitchfork.
It’s a brand that is worth a substantial sum.
Though the current editors damn near destroyed it with their PC “Journalism”.
Which turned out to be fiction based on a true story that some drug-addled crack whore thought up. Or dreamed about, or something...
They perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s. They were the publication of record for everything rock & roll...therefore everything cool.
The end of an era.
Bezos.
Zuckerberg never even heard of them.
Exactly. Rolling Stone was trying to appeal to a demographic that didn’t buy magazines.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is arguably the most entertaining book ever written. And you can read it probably in one three hour sitting.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
But if they didn’t go that route, they become Readers Digest for Boomer stoners.
They did a pretty amazing job remaining relevant for as long as they did when you think about it. Someone above pined for the days of PJ O’Rourke. I don’t think O’Rourker starting writing there until the mid 80s - or 20 years into their run. When I started reading in the late 80s, the big 3 names were O’Rourke, Bill Greider, and Thompson - who would occasionally publish some drug-addled gibberish that we pretended was still “classic Hunter.”
I think you can make a strong argument that Thompson maybe wrote three worthwhile things after the late 70s. I spent so much money over the years on compilations that included yet another excerpt from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail......
Ah yes, Mark Seliger. One of the great cover photographers for that magazine. Most were really good. Some lacked a bit of good taste.
I think Milo could turn it around...
It was time to stop reading Rolling Stone when I realized i had never heard of most of the bands or songs that were charting.
Yep.
A classic.
So the writers will have to go back to writing “Beaver Hunt” for Hustler?
I wish this leftist rag a long and painful death. It plastered the Boston marathon murderer on its cover, leading hundreds of empty head females to declare their sexual interest in him.
It posted a picture of charles manson that glorified him. It put justin trudeau on its cover, declaring its admiration for him.
Plus the UVA fake rape case.
I hope this rag ceases to exist and the staff becomes sex slaves of larry flynt.
Pop music is far dumber today and Rolling Stoned puts those poster idols on the cover (when they aren’t putting leftist politicos on the cover).
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