“Rolling Stone, you see, suffers from the all-too-common affliction which I like to call ‘Good Stories, Bad Magazine Syndrome’,” argues Hamilton Nolan over at Gawker. “That is, while Rolling Stone can be reliably counted on to put out a number of important, groundbreaking, top-notch works of journalism throughout the year, they will never put out enough of those stories to make the types of people who care about those stories seriously consider reading the magazine on a regular basis.”
Jason Fry, over at the The Nieman Journalism Lab, meanwhile, asks, “What if no publication can pull its discrete articles into a coherent whole?”
To be honest, I can’t understand how Rolling Stone manages to sell at all. On the one hand, the magazine seems to be heavily marketed toward 12 year-old pop music fans. Then, every so often, it tries to push for New Yorker territory with a complex investigative political piece like Michael Hastings’ ‘The Runaway General’. 12 year-old pop music fans don’t give a shit about foreign affairs. And those searching for quality long-form journalism aren’t going to subscribe to a magazine in which top billing is reserved for Twilight and Lady Gaga fluff. Rolling Stone has no ideal reader.
This just makes me even more sure that what makes great magazines great is a winning, coherent personality. Great content isn’t enough.
Comments
2 responses to “Links: Magazines Without Personality”
I know, right!
They may well survive on people like me with benevolent elderly relatives who just keep renewing that subscription at Christmas time (since I was a tween, incidentally…).
They seem to be stuck in a bit of a fix where they try to present themselves as the finger-on-the-pulse harbinger of new and happening music whilst celebrating classic rock (see their recent consecutive run of Hendrix and AC DC covers).
Neither of these things they actually do half as well as blogs and Mojo or Uncut, which make no effort to present themselves as celebrators of the past – any contemporary coverage is a handy bonus.
So Rolling Stone doesn’t really have a place at ALL, and like you said even when they do have an excellent piece of journalism it gets its balls cut off by the content of the pages around it.
Annnnyway. That was a poorly thought out rant.
Quite. The same goes for Vanity Fair, if you’ve ever read it.
The front half of V.F. is full of photos of drunk celebrities and so forth. The back half comprises ten-page dissertations about politics and what they actually claim to be the best economics journalism out there.
There’s no arguing that everyone reads it for the former. I guess the idea is, if anyone sees you reading it, you can show them some of the back half and say, “I love this mag, but reading it sure is HARD YAKKA.”