End of an era?

And now, a few words in memory of 34 1/2-year-old Rolling Stone magazine. Don't get me wrong. Jann Wenner's brainchild hasn't folded, but it is going to be revamped with an eye toward attracting short attention-span-afflicted readers. That's bad news.

You may wish to charge Rolling Stone with being no more than a countercultural rag, a pied piper leading teens into drug-taking and radical-left politics. You may wish to joke that its readers have always had short attention spans. You may have a partial point in each regard. Nonetheless, there's good reason to lament RS's coming dumbing-down: It apparently will end the magazine's tradition of publishing a great deal of high-quality long-form reporting.

According to David Carr of the New York Times, Wenner "believes that today's young reader has little patience for long articles." Wenner himself says, "There is so much media [sic] around. Back when Rolling Stone was publishing these 7,000-word stories, there was no CNN, no Internet. And now you can travel instantaneously around the globe, and you don't need these long stories to get up to speed."

What a crock. Cable television and the Web are ideal for rapidly delivering the basics of the news. Rolling Stone, a biweekly, could step back and shape a story, and its best reporting provided detail and context, presented with flair. The magazine didn't homer every time at bat, of course, but its slugging average was all-star caliber.

The first extraordinary RS piece I remember centered on Evel Knievel's September 1974 jump over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. The parachute in Knievel's vehicle deployed prematurely, spoiling the jump. Moreover, Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon a few hours earlier, more than slightly overshadowing it in terms of newsworthiness.

In the end, the article, which captured splendidly both the hype and the backstage goings-on, may have been the most lasting result of the whole non-event. What's sad, in retrospect, is that it was written by Joe Eszterhas, later the trashmeister behind "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls." Talk about squandered talent.

Other Rolling Stone gems that stand out for me are David Black's remarkably detailed mid-'80s effort on the early years of AIDS, and, a few years ago, Rian Malan's fascinating history of the famous South African song known in this country as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Straight reporting wasn't all RS offered. It serialized Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and gave the wonderful P.J. O'Rourke a forum. No, it wasn't on the level of the New Yorker, but RS was far, far more than hippies playing with typewriters.

Rolling Stone has slipped a bit recently, devoting too much space to ephemera like Britney Spears, but it's still been worth a look. That probably won't be true much longer. Wenner has chosen Ed Needham as RS's managing editor. Needham joins RS from FHM, one of those new raunchy, young-men-oriented magazines (Maxim is another), which are sort of a cross between Esquire and Playboy, but less intelligent.

Needham told the Times, "All the great media adventures of the 20th century have been visual. Television, movies, the Internet, they're all visual mediums [sic], and I don't think people have time to sit down and read." And no time to read, of course, usually means no time to think.

Attitude often substitutes for thinking, and "Well Hung at Dawn," a column in the online version of Rolling Stone, certainly yields plenty of 'tude.

The "WHAD" in front of me consists of two guys tossing out observations on topics from the Stanley Cup playoffs to Natalie Portman. It's very hipper-than-thou-to-the-point-of-annoyance, as you might expect -- and outrageous in its comments related to President Bush and the war on terrorism.

At a late-May press conference for Bush and French president Jacques Chirac, NBC reporter David Gregory addressed Chirac in French, with Bush then wisecracking sarcastically about Gregory's language skills. Apropos of that incident, "WHAD" spews, "On behalf of NBC's David Gregory, here's three intercontinental words for our half-wit 'president' -- Nique ta mere! "

If you know French -- or if you've read Christopher Caldwell's May 6 Weekly Standard piece on French anti- Semitism -- you know how ugly those words are. Caldwell reports that "Nique ta mere les juifs" -- "F--- your mother, Jews" -- is "commonplace" graffiti in France.

In the current climate, to use even part of that phrase to malign anyone, especially the leader in our battle with violent intolerance, is beyond offensive. If such a tone seeps into Rolling Stone itself, that, obviously, would be worse than a mere dumbing-down of a formerly fine publication. It would represent its moral collapse.

The magazine hasn't been musically relevant for well over a decade and the quality of their journalism had been non-existent for much longer.

In the 1992 election cycle the magazine published an extended roundtable interview with Bill Clinton, jan and another syncophant for Bill, and Hunter S. Thompson, and P.J. O'Rourke. The interview has Bill promoting such odd (and never realized/proposed in 8 years) concepts as India Indian banking loans. Hunter and PJ see Der Schlickmeister for what he is and cut up like Bevis and Butthead at the back of the classroom but they never sink their fangs into this turkey ripe for the plucking.

The one key relevance I've found in my limited exposure to RS's early years is the Rolling Stone's Altamont followup issue. This volume of the magazine probably spent more type chronicling this episode than anything else since. The recent Criterion DVD is good for offering phone-ins to a radio show (but edited down from the day's broadcast).

Everything else comes with about as much bias as a night's worth of 60 Minutes.

Online reporting from one site I visited gave a better accounting of the problems with the 1999 Woodstock event (a fecal odor permiated the air by the second day partly because people were using bags and throwing them in the trash). I think the name was something like sonic.net but that seems too short. My limited knowledge of these kind of fests does include the burning down (and looting) of the food stands at the original Woodstock. The destruction of the walls, the burning of the stage, etc. at the Isle of Wight festival, the general aggitation at Altamont (the Hell's Angels' murder was of a man that had just pulled a gun - self-defense/protection that they were hired to give???). The press and MTV/VH-1 have never acknowledged that the Peace-Love-Dope hippies could be just as ruthless and anti-social. There was also a bit noted in the book written by the financers of the original Woodstock where Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panthers "shook them down" for a $10,000 donation and free booths at the festival lest they trash the credibility and safety of the event. Pete Townsend smacked Abbie off the stage with his guitar when Abbie tried to rush the microphone, a TRUE triumph of rock & roll over hippie gate crashers. The Who later called it the worst show that they ever had to play.

The magazine has sucked for far too long. Mojo from England is good on short form music articles and carries a lot more credibility. It also doesn't talk down to the audience so if you are late to a music tradition, you'll actually get the background skinny. In the end, you may still not want to listen to a particular band but they aren't just spouting PR from the big labels.

George Magazine was folding due to lack of readers before JFK Jr.'s accident, Penthouse is barely holding on, Rosie will be gone by the end of the decade.

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