Every journalist should read Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism: How a Magazine Born in the 1960s Changed America. For the first 20 years of its existence Rolling Stone produced some of the greatest journalism in American history.
The names of its fearless contributors are familiar—Hunter S. Thompson, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Annie Leibovitz, Tom Wolfe. Under Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, the magazine achieved great things.
Today, of course, Rolling Stone is widely considered a joke. This is owing largely—although not solely—to “A Rape on Campus,” the 9,000-word story published in 2014 about a group of frat boys who supposedly gang-raped a woman on the campus of University of Virginia. The story turned out to be false. It was retracted about a month after publication, and Rolling Stone and the article’s author Sabrina Rubin Erdely were successfully sued for libel and defamation in a $7.5 million lawsuit.
Having learned nothing from that experience, Rolling Stone today is hysterical, woke, and even communist in its bent.
It wasn’t always this way. Jann Wenner who, along with Ralph J. Gleason, co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967, may have been an egomaniac, control freak, and a bit of a jerk. But, as author Charles L. Ponce de Leon shows, Wenner was also ambitious and wise in his stewardship of the magazine. His vision and even humility allowed him to hire the best people and let them flourish, even if they disagreed with him. This produced a magazine of surpassing excellence that was always engaging. Hiring people who were allowed to criticize its founder, willing to take on sacred cows (even if they were rock stars), and demanding high standards while taking on challenging subjects in new ways—these are all things that today’s version of the magazine has lost the courage to do.
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