Gathering Lots of Moss

Hot news from the magazine world: Wenner Media, publisher of venerable music/culture magazine Rolling Stone, has just hired its first-ever executive with responsibility for all things digital.

Oh. My. God. What decade are we in?

Let's face it, Rolling Stone, once the hippest magazine on the planet, hasn't been anything like hip for decades. Dislocated hip, maybe, or broken hip. Something elderly-sounding. But even that's no excuse for how badly the magazine has missed the digital zeitgeist. This probably shouldn't be surprising, since it never really caught up with the music video revolution a generation ago, either, and is still largely stuck in the '60s and '70s in its view of music and culture. 

Its Web site is abominable, the worst sort of cut-and-paste print repurposing job, and founder and CEO Jann Wenner still openly worries about cannibalizing print readers by putting content online. (Good news, though: He's started reading the New York Times online! Far out, man!) Turns out, in fact, that RollingStone.com has basically been outsourced to Real Networks (another happening sort of outfit) for the past few years. Sheesh.

Now, finally, Rolling Stone is going to try to get with this digital thing all the kids are talking about–you know, that social networking stuff and those mp3s and iPod thingies they seem to be using to play music instead of vinyl LPs and 45s. What a concept. The magazine must be all-a-Twitter. Better (or worse) yet, the company's new chief digital officer comes from no less a cutting-edge publisher than...Readers Digest.

Best of luck to them, but this is just more proof that, when it comes to the online realm, magazines make even newspapers look forward-thinking. In the end, the lesson here may be, to twist a phrase on which Rolling Stone all but based its founding philosophy back in 1967: Never trust any magazine over 30.

Comments

[Patrick Thornton]

@Mark,

Readers Digest? That's rich. I don't think Rolling Stone is going to get it anytime soon, and it will be to their peril.

I've long found Rolling Stone to be a terrible, self-indulgent publication. The only subscriber I've ever known was a high school teacher. He was an aging hippie of sorts. So, yeah.

Their print content is out of touch. Their Web site is an embarrassment. It's funny how a publication that was created to shake things up has become the status quo. Imagine if in 1967, we would have told Rolling Stone staffers that 40 years from now they would be stodgier than the New York Times.