Rolling Stone
Based on Wikipedia: Rolling Stone
Seven Thousand Dollars and a Dream
In 1967, a twenty-one-year-old college dropout borrowed $7,500 from his family and his girlfriend's parents to start a magazine. That sum—worth about $71,000 today—launched what would become the defining voice of rock and roll journalism for the next half-century. The dropout was Jann Wenner, and the magazine was Rolling Stone.
The first issue hit newsstands on November 9, 1967, priced at twenty-five cents. On its cover: John Lennon wearing a military helmet from his role in the antiwar film "How I Won the War." The format was scrappy—tabloid-sized newsprint, the kind of paper that leaves ink on your fingers. Inside, the lead story covered the Monterey International Pop Festival, where Jimi Hendrix had set his guitar on fire just months earlier and Janis Joplin had announced herself to the world.
Where did the name come from? Wenner explained it in that first issue with characteristic casual ambition: the old proverb about rolling stones gathering no moss, Muddy Waters' blues song "Rollin' Stone," the British band who borrowed their name from Muddy, and Bob Dylan's epochal 1965 single "Like a Rolling Stone." The magazine's identity was built right into its name—a lineage connecting Delta blues to British invasion rock to Dylan's poetic reinvention of popular music.
Neither Underground Nor Establishment
Rolling Stone emerged from San Francisco's counterculture, but it wasn't quite of it. This distinction matters.
The late 1960s had spawned dozens of underground newspapers—the Berkeley Barb, the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press—publications that mixed radical politics with intentionally amateurish production values. They saw professional journalism as part of the establishment machinery they opposed.
Wenner and his co-founder, the music critic Ralph J. Gleason, made a different bet. They wanted to cover the counterculture with the rigor and credibility of traditional journalism. "It's not just about the music," Wenner wrote in that first issue, "but about the things and attitudes that music embraces." But he wanted to document those attitudes professionally, not as propaganda.
This positioning proved brilliant. The underground papers eventually faded. Rolling Stone survived because it built institutional credibility while remaining culturally credible to its audience. The magazine's cheeky slogan—"All the news that fits"—was lifted from a parody of the New York Times' motto. The joke worked because Rolling Stone actually aspired to that level of seriousness, just applied to subjects the Times ignored.
The Gonzo Years
The 1970s transformed Rolling Stone from a music magazine into something stranger and more significant.
The turning point came with Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist whose approach to reporting was so unorthodox that he needed a new word for it: gonzo. Thompson didn't pretend to objectivity. He inserted himself into stories as a character, mixing fact and hallucination, observation and outrage, in prose that read like nothing else in American journalism.
In 1971, Rolling Stone serialized Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which began as an assignment to cover a motorcycle race in the desert. The actual event occupied perhaps a paragraph of the finished work. The rest was a drug-fueled odyssey through the American dream and its discontents, featuring rental car abuse, hotel room destruction, and some of the most quotable sentences ever published in a magazine. Thompson stayed with Rolling Stone as a contributing editor until his death in 2005.
But Thompson was just one voice in what became a remarkable stable of talent. The magazine hired Cameron Crowe when he was still a teenager—he later turned his experiences into the film "Almost Famous." Lester Bangs brought a manic, confrontational style to rock criticism. Tom Wolfe, already famous for coining "The Me Decade" and pioneering New Journalism, serialized his novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" in the magazine's pages.
Annie Leibovitz joined as a photographer in 1970 and became chief photographer by 1973. Her images appeared on more than 140 covers, creating some of the most iconic photographs in popular culture. When John Lennon was murdered in December 1980, it was Leibovitz's photo of him curled naked around Yoko Ono—taken just hours before his death—that became the lasting image. Vanity Fair later called it the greatest Rolling Stone cover ever.
Breaking Real News
The magazine's most celebrated early journalism wasn't about rock stars at all. It was about murder.
In January 1970, Rolling Stone published its investigation of the Altamont Free Concert, a disaster that had occurred just weeks earlier. The December 1969 concert was supposed to be the West Coast's answer to Woodstock—a free festival headlined by the Rolling Stones. Instead, the Hells Angels, hired as security in exchange for $500 worth of beer, beat audience members with pool cues. During the Stones' set, an eighteen-year-old named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by an Angel, an act captured on film.
Rolling Stone's coverage won the magazine its first National Magazine Award. Later that year, a 30,000-word feature on Charles Manson—including an interview conducted while Manson awaited trial in the Los Angeles County Jail—won another.
These weren't music stories. They were crime stories, cultural stories, stories about the dark underside of the counterculture's utopian dreams. Rolling Stone was positioning itself as the publication of record for understanding what was actually happening in America, not just what was happening in recording studios.
Moving to Manhattan
In 1977, Wenner relocated the magazine from San Francisco to New York City, announcing that San Francisco had become "a cultural backwater." The move was controversial—critics saw it as a betrayal of the magazine's countercultural roots—but it reflected where American media power actually resided.
The 1980s brought changes that some longtime readers found harder to swallow. The magazine hired an advertising agency to refocus its image, running a campaign called "Perception/Reality" that compared symbols of the 1960s to their 1980s equivalents. The message: Rolling Stone's audience had grown up, gotten jobs, acquired purchasing power that advertisers wanted to reach.
Coverage shifted accordingly. Music remained central, but celebrities, films, and pop culture claimed more real estate. The annual "Hot Issue" became a fixture. By the 1990s, the magazine was explicitly targeting younger readers interested in youth-oriented television and movie stars. Critics accused it of emphasizing style over substance—a far cry from the publication that had serialized Thompson and Wolfe.
The Vampire Squid and the Runaway General
After years of declining relevance, Rolling Stone staged an improbable comeback in the late 2000s with old-fashioned investigative journalism.
Matt Taibbi became the magazine's most provocative voice with his coverage of the 2008 financial crisis. His description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" entered the lexicon. It was exactly the kind of vivid, furious, quotable prose that had defined the magazine's golden age.
Then came the scoop that reached the White House. In June 2010, journalist Michael Hastings published "The Runaway General," a profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of American forces in Afghanistan. The article quoted McChrystal and his staff mocking Vice President Joe Biden and other administration officials with an openness that suggested they'd forgotten a reporter was in the room. Within days of publication, McChrystal had resigned.
It was a reminder of what magazines could still do in an age of instant digital news: spend weeks or months with a subject, observe unguarded moments, and publish something that changed the course of events. Hastings' book expanding on the article, "The Operators," reached Amazon's bestseller list within forty-eight hours of release.
The Business of Survival
Print magazines were dying throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and Rolling Stone was not immune. The economics that had sustained American journalism—advertisers paying premium rates to reach engaged readers—collapsed as advertising migrated to digital platforms that could target audiences more precisely and cheaply.
In 2016, Wenner sold 49 percent of the magazine to BandLab Technologies, a company from Singapore. A year later, he sold the remaining 51 percent to Penske Media Corporation, which already owned Variety, Deadline Hollywood, and other entertainment publications. By 2019, Penske had acquired BandLab's stake, gaining complete ownership. The founder who had started the magazine with borrowed money was out.
The new owners made immediate changes. In 2018, Rolling Stone switched from biweekly to monthly publication—a significant reduction that reflected the realities of print economics. But they also expanded internationally, launching a Chinese edition in 2021 and a British edition later that year in partnership with the publisher of Attitude magazine.
In 2022, Rolling Stone acquired Life Is Beautiful, a music and arts festival in Las Vegas. "Live events are an integral part of Rolling Stone's future," the company announced—an acknowledgment that a magazine brand might survive even if the magazine itself becomes secondary to festivals, websites, and other extensions.
The Magazine as Object
The physical form of Rolling Stone tells its own history.
The first five years, from 1967 to 1972, used folded tabloid newsprint with no staples—essentially a newspaper calling itself a magazine. The only color was a single highlight shade that changed with each edition. In 1973, the switch to full color printing on different newsprint marked the magazine's growing commercial success.
The transformation into what most people picture when they think of Rolling Stone—glossy paper, large format—happened in 1980. At ten by twelve inches, the covers had room for Leibovitz's portraits to breathe. The magazine shrank to standard size (eight by eleven inches) in 2008, likely for production cost reasons, only to return to the large format in 2018. In 2024, another redesign introduced new fonts and grittier paper stock.
One curiosity: the thousand-issue milestone in 2006 featured a three-dimensional hologram cover that cost a million dollars to produce. Whether this was a celebration of the magazine's legacy or a desperate attempt to seem relevant in an increasingly digital age depends on your perspective.
The Cover as Cultural Artifact
The Beatles have appeared on Rolling Stone's cover more than thirty times, individually or as a group. This statistic captures something essential about the magazine's function: it didn't just cover rock and roll, it canonized it.
Those early covers read like a syllabus of the rock era's founding figures. The first ten issues featured John Lennon (twice), Tina Turner, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix (twice), Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, and coverage of the Monterey Pop Festival. These weren't arbitrary choices—they were declarations about who mattered, who was shaping the culture, whose work would endure.
The cover became its own art form, particularly under Leibovitz's direction. Her images weren't just photographs; they were statements. A naked John Lennon embracing a clothed Yoko Ono. A body-painted Demi Moore. These covers generated controversy, which generated attention, which sold magazines—a formula the publication understood better than almost any of its competitors.
What Remains
In August 2025, Rolling Stone named Shirley Halperin as co-editor in chief, making her the first woman to hold that title in the magazine's nearly sixty-year history. She also became head of music, a signal that the publication hasn't abandoned its core identity even as it expands into events and digital content.
The magazine that Jann Wenner started with borrowed money in 1967 has outlived most of its competitors from that era and survived the digital apocalypse that destroyed so much of American print media. Whether what remains is really Rolling Stone—the irreverent, countercultural, occasionally brilliant publication that defined rock journalism—or merely a brand attached to various media properties is a question the market will eventually answer.
But the archive endures: Thompson's hallucinatory dispatches, Leibovitz's portraits, the early coverage of Altamont and Manson, the vampire squid and the runaway general. For fifty-plus years, Rolling Stone documented American popular culture with an ambition and style that few publications matched. Like the old proverb says, a rolling stone gathers no moss. But it does, apparently, gather quite a lot of history.