A Rock Institution Rolls Away Wrinkles

The new Rolling Stone--with shorter stories, more bullet points, gadget reviews and a 38-year-old British editor--hits newsstands today, with a cover story on the Vines, an emerging Aussie rock band. So far, reaction in media circles is looking like a boomer slugfest.

“What do you do when you hit your midlife crisis? Do you start acting like a teenager, or do you get depressed and cocoon?” said Samir Husni, 49, a professor of magazine journalism at the University of Mississippi. “I think they opted to buy the convertible and start acting like a teenager.”

(The teenager in question is Blender, a new music magazine tailored to the attention-impaired generation. Pressed by declining newsstand sales and the new competition, Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner chose to “Blenderize,” Husni said.)

Wenner, 56, is having none of it. “On the subject of Blender,” Wenner said Thursday from his New York office, “it’s way over-hyped.... Their claim to success is really bogus.”

Andy Pemberton, the British editor in chief of Blender, paraphrased his countryman to respond to Wenner: “He doth protest too much.”

Wenner is equally dismissive of critics such as Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University who wrote in USA Today last month: “Now, one of the most worthless trends in magazine journalism--the rise of the so-called ‘laddie’ magazines such as Maxim--has been handed the living legacy that is Rolling Stone.... It’s the oldest story in the world that stupidity sells. The question is why intelligence sold out.”

“He leaped to all these conclusions,” Wenner said. “He’s a disgruntled guy because times have changed on him.... It’s a sentimental thing. He’s sad that his youth has passed. He’s going to take it out on an institution that remains young, but he’s looking in the mirror.”

(Freedman said he didn’t want to make a career of criticizing Rolling Stone and declined to comment for this story.)

“At least initially, the signs of what people feared are on display--shorter stories, the more flesh-filled photos,” said Brent Cunningham, the 36-year-old managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. The new issue has more sidebars, more smallish features and a greatly expanded “back of the book,” with more than 100 CD reviews, nearly five times the usual number.

The longer pieces that established the magazine as a cultural force will appear less frequently. Where words used to go, there will be skin. “I would hope there’s more skin,” Wenner said. “It should be a little sexier.”

The competition for readers and for readers’ time is fierce, said Rolling Stone’s new editor, Ed Needham. “When Rolling Stone started, it was the only game in town,” he said. “The reality on the newsstand is very different. The serious, in-depth pieces ... features that run over many pages, that formula isn’t so successful these days.”

The criticism, he said, comes from nostalgia. “The brand value of Rolling Stone--it produces such a warm and pleasant feeling,” Needham said. “It’s the emotional glow they seem to experience when they think of Rolling Stone.”

Rolling Stone has a paid circulation of 1.25 million. But newsstand sales have declined nearly 16% in the first half of the year.

“So they can’t be that fond of it,” Needham said. “The word I would stress to everybody is energy. I want the magazine to feel energetic, exciting. Part of the problem that Rolling Stone is facing is what other magazines are facing too, that the ad recession is biting so deep.... If we have fewer editorial pages, a gigantic 12-to 15-page spread in the middle of the magazine, it will be like an elephant in a bathtub, the balance is out of whack. It’s a factor of the economy rather than an editorial decision.”

Wenner understands why he’s facing criticism for changing a publishing institution. “Few magazines have such resonance for that generation,” he said. “Rolling Stone has always stood for something. It was always far more than a marketing package.”

Not anymore, some fear.

Milton Glaser, the graphic designer who created the I {heart}NY logo and has been involved in redesigns of major publications, said magazines are becoming less interesting, and that Rolling Stone is just another example of the trend.

“What you see is what happens once financial issues become the overriding concern: Aesthetics, beauty, truth were once a counterpoint, now they’re eliminated,” Glaser said. “It’s tired stuff, it’s exploitative, it’s not life-enhancing.”

But Wenner said the new Rolling Stone is just packaged differently. “You won’t miss a word,” he said. Stories will still be culturally relevant. “We’re not walking away from that. Not while I’m alive.”