Rolling Stone, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10151, Tel: 212-758-3800.
In 1967, abrasive journalist-fan Jann S. Wenner started publishing
the rock tabloid "Rolling Stone" from a San Francisco warehouse. Wenner's
editing genius and identification with his material and audience helped
make "Rolling Stone" a critical and then a financial success. When the
music died in the 70s, Wenner stretched the boundaries of the "new
journalism" -- publishing the drug-culture phantasmagoria of Hunter S.
Thompson and other long, personal features by talented younger writers.
Wenner also published investigative pieces: e.g., Howard Kohn's research
into the Nixon-Howard Hughes-Meyer Lansky connection, and Carl Bernstein's
legendary article on CIA infiltration of the media.
The later history of "Rolling Stone" is usually told as a cautionary
tale. Wenner moved his paper to New York, hung out with Mick Jagger and
other deep thinkers, lost money (without ceasing to be rich), and finally
lost his sense of the fragmenting pop music scene. In the feel-good 80s,
much of the paper's younger readership turned Reaganite. But the paper's
political reporting improved -- not so much because of P.J. O'Rourke (the
right-wing Hunter S. Thompson) as because veteran journalist William F.
Greider had become political editor.
-- Steve Badrich
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