Readers Trust Rolling Stone, Now Over 30
Buzz, the financially challenged Talk of Los Angeles, will fade away after its June issue as Wired is acquired by the mighty Conde Nast Publications. By these standards of recent days, Rolling Stone should have been a goner long ago, or become part of a huge publishing empire.
But Rolling Stone, a rebellious and independent child of the countercultural ‘60s not only is still rolling but has become a respectable 30 years old. The biweekly magazine has the handsome goods to prove it too.
A new coffee-table book, “Rolling Stone: The Complete Covers, 1967-1997,” published by Rolling Stone Press and Harry N. Abrams Inc., tells the story of the magazine and its often turbulent times through the arresting cover portraits that have been its signature and sound bites from its pages.
Out this week is the second of the magazine’s 30th-anniversary issues, whose playful cover showing the “Seinfeld” four as their “Wizard of Oz” counterparts belies the “State of the Union” package inside. The profiles of 44 young people reflect a basic optimism in the land amid a diversity of lifestyles.
In addition, Rolling Stone will make the first attempt to fill the “Seinfeld” void next Thursday. At 9 p.m. on ABC, it will present “Where It’s At: The Rolling Stone State of the Union,” a two-hour special of live music (Jewel, Bruce Springsteen and others) and very personal interviews from around the country that sounds more of the soul-searching notes introduced in the print issue.
How does it feel?
“The awards felt great,” said Jann S. Wenner, the editor in chief and publisher, referring to the two National Magazine Awards the magazine won recently for reporting and general excellence. “We’re still basking in the glow of those awards.”
Wenner was a 20-year-old college dropout when he channeled his passion for rock music into the 1967 launch on grainy paper of Rolling Stone, whose circulation now totals 1.25 million and whose advertising revenue last year was estimated at $121 million.
Like the Rolling Stones, “Saturday Night Live” and any other rock-generation fixture begun when their founders were much younger souls, Rolling Stone is a wide target for those who would argue that it’s become unavoidably hidebound. The weekly New York Press, the politically incorrect alternative to the Village Voice, recently ran an eight-page evisceration (“No Mas: How Rolling Stone Turned 30, and Why You Don’t Care”), which argued that the magazine of today is timid, market-researched and slow to spot what’s new in music and culture.
At the same time, even if some who grew up with the Stones and the magazine now wouldn’t know Beck from Beck’s, the recent awards confirm a kind of reliability that hipness alone does not ensure. Rolling Stone won the reporting award--it boasted two of the five finalists in the category--for John Colapinto’s expose in December, “The Story of John / Joan,” which uncovered thousands of so-called “sex reassignment” surgeries performed around the country. Rolling Stone’s first award for general excellence, which is like an Oscar for best picture, recognized the magazine’s “powerful investigative journalism, superb interviews and authoritative entertainment reportage--all in a brilliantly designed package.”
Keeping the magazine lively after 30 years “has to do with instincts for the news,” Wenner said. “If you look at culture and music and all that stuff as news, which I think it is, it will lead you to what’s important and fresh.”
Wenner Media Inc. also owns Men’s Journal and Us magazine, having started and sold off Outside in 1979 and Family Life in 1995. “Now, we have a pretty full plate with the three magazines we have, but it’s always possible that we would do something new again,” he said. “But I would want a really good idea, instead of just doing some kind of niche publication. I would want something that would really engage me.”
TV Newsman as Novelist: On Bill O’Reilly’s long book tour around the country, he’s had the good fortune to be interviewed by TV anchors who actually have read his first novel. No surprise, seeing that “Those Who Trespass” is a tale of murder, television and TV news in particular.
O’Reilly, who hosts the Fox News Channel’s nightly “The O’Reilly Factor,” has drawn on his years of doing news at the local and network levels to people his thriller with hot-dogging correspondents, anchor gods and other characters all too familiar to those in the business.
Publishers Weekly praised the book’s “war stories” and “nifty TV dirt,” adding that it’s “script-stripped and beach-ready.”
O’Reilly said he wrote “Those Who Trespass” between leaving TV’s “Inside Edition” in March 1995 and taking an academic breather at Harvard. He sold the book to Bancroft Press, a new house in Baltimore that publishes the work of journalists and counts this as its first foray into fiction.
Afterwords: Eric Alterman will continue to write about the media for the Nation as he also launches a new column in the May 25 issue, “republic opinion,” on politics and more. . . .
* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.