Pretty much all newspapers and magazines are struggling these days, what with competiton from the Internet in both immediacy and price. If you haven't seen Time since its redesign at the beginning of ther year, you might be surprised by how little the original newsweekly deals with actual news. They assume their readers already know what happened last week (fair enough), and are looking for deeper insight and analysis. As a writer, I'm all in favor of magazines doing well and its writers being paid for their efforts, but even I'm not sure the new Time really justifies its cover price.
And then there's the case of Rolling Stone, which loves its anniversary issues and is currently celebrating its 40th. The new issue is the first of 3 that will deal with the big date, and it features interviews with folks that veteran RS readers and detractors will recognize as Usual Suspects: Jackson Browne, Michael Moore, George McGovern, Bob Weir, and a bunch of others. Browne hasn't been a chart presence in over 20 years and Weir's band disappeared over 10 years ago, but as far as Jann Wenner is concerned they're still a very big deal.
Rolling Stone has spent most of its existence in an identity crisis. It's inextricably linked to the 1960s, and no doubt will be 20 years from now when an ocotgenarian Wenner is chatting with the octogenarian Weir. But as a pop culture magazine with a concentration on rock music, it has to go where the audience is, and the original Rolling Stone readership began checking out of new music about 30 years ago. Punk was the first real test of whether Rolling Stone would stick with its core audience or cover punk as the next big thing, and they tried to have it both ways, covering the Clash and Bob Dylan with equal fervor (Rolling Stone never did pay much attention to disco, but disco was a baby boomer art form and don't let anyone tell you differently). Rap was an even bigger test for RS, and I think it's undeniable that the mag has never given hip-hop its due.
As time has gone on, this dichotomy between the RS past and pop music's present has become ever more stark. Rolling Stone has famously featured Britney Spears on its cover in various states of tease and undress, but I'm not sure that anyone who still reads the magazine, even the younger readers, ever cared to see more about Britney. In this environment of increasingly narrow focus for magazines and economic uncertainty, it's hard for me to believe there's an appreciable number of people who want to read a Fall Out Boy cover story one week and an interview with the 1972 Democratic candidate for president the next, and it makes me wonder how many people are subscribed to Rolling Stone out of inertia. One thing's for sure, as long as Wenner is calling the shots, this isn't going to change; he's been walking that tightrope between covering his old friends and those his kids (and now grandkids) care about for 3 decades now.
