14 JUNE 02: YES, DR.
THOMPSON, IT HAS INDEED COME TO THIS.

From June
13 NEW YORK TIMES:

Rolling Stone, Struggling
for Readers, Names Briton as Editor

By DAVID CARR

Rolling Stone, a magazine
that all but defined the American countercultural

epoch, yesterday named a
British managing editor schooled in the racy ways of

contemporary English men’s
magazines. The appointment signals the end of Rolling

Stone’s history as a publisher
of epic narratives and literary journalism, in

part because the owner,
Jann Wenner, believes that today’s young reader has

little patience for long
articles.

    The new
editor, Ed Needham, comes from the English-owned FHM (For Him Magazine),

whose two-year-old American
version is the nation’s fastest-growing magazine.

Its circulation is now more
than a million, bigger than that of Esquire or GQ.

    Rolling
Stone, meanwhile, has struggled to keep its readers and advertisers. in

the face of competition
from magazines like Entertainment Weekly and the music

magazine Blender. Mr. Wenner
has decided on a gamble that his storied magazine ˜

which has published Tom
Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson among others ˜ can be

reconfigured for a new kind
of reader. The current audience for Rolling Stone

has grown up on “Fear Factor,”
not “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

    And in
a world saturated with media choices, many editors have concluded that

the words in magazines are
often beside the point, as some of the more

successful publications
like Maxim communicate visually with funny charts,

outrageous photos and articles
that are increasingly little more than captions

on pictures. Mr. Wenner
seems to agree.

    “There
is so much media around,” said Mr. Wenner, who retains the title of

editor.
“Back when Rolling Stone was publishing these 7,000 word stories, there

was
no CNN, no Internet. And now you can travel instantaneously around the

globe,
and you don’t need these long stories to get up to speed.”

    “We cover
change, and we have to change in response to the times,” Mr. Wenner

added, saying that the fundamental
mission of the twice-a-month magazine would

not be altered, but the
execution would.

    While
he said he would not turn Rolling Stone into a a so-called laddie

magazine, Mr. Needham promised
that he would reintroduce the element of surprise

to the 35-year-old publication.
Mr. Needham emphasized that there would still be

feature articles, just that
they would be shorter and better illustrated.

    “All
the great media adventures of the 20th century have been visual,” said
Mr.

Needham, 37, who grew up
in Cambridge, England. “Television, movies, the

Internet, they’re all visual
mediums, and I don’t think people have time to
sit

down
and read. The gaps in people’s time keep getting smaller and
smaller, and

the competition is getting
more intense. It’s one of the facts of media life.”

    Another
editor recently hired by Mr. Wenner, Bonnie Fuller, is applying those

lessons to US Weekly. Ms.
Fuller’s celebrity magazine has become a circus of

photos, gossip and fashion
faux pas, and is finding early success on the

newsstand, according to
officials of Wenner Media.

    In April,
when Mr. Wenner dismissed Robert Love, who had been at the magazine

for 20 years and managing
editor for four and a half years, he made it clear

that he was looking for
a less wordy approach to help stem Rolling Stone’s

slide.

    Its ad
pages fell more than 25 percent from 1999 to 2001, hit hard by the

continuing flight of tobacco
ads from youth-oriented magazines. (Through the

first five months of this
year, however, it has rebounded slightly, by 2.4

percent.) Its circulation
has remained flat at about 1.25 million, but its

newsstand sales ˜ a barometer
of a magazine’s vitality with readers ˜ fell

nearly 10 percent in the
last half of 2002 compared with the period in 2001,

according to the Audit Bureau
of Circulations.

    Some
of those readers and advertisers have moved to magazines like Blender,

which has used short pieces,
provocative writing and humorous headlines and

captions to stand out in
a crowded marketplace with music magazines like Vibe

and Spin. The magazine,
which is owned by Dennis Publishing, which also produces

Maxim, promises advertisers
that it reaches 350,000 paying readers with each

issue. Beginning with its
August issue, Blender’s issues will increase from

every other month to 10
times a year.

    Rolling
Stone is also facing stepped-up competition from Time Inc.’s

Entertainment Weekly, which
recently initiated a monthly music supplement called

Listen2This.

    The issue
of reviving Rolling Stone is a critical one for the privately held

Wenner Media, which publishes
Men’s Journal in addition to Rolling Stone and Us

Weekly. The music magazine
has historically served as a cash machine to finance

Mr. Wenner’s other endeavors.
To fight a growing perception that Rolling Stone

could be the next Playboy
˜ a hugely successful magazine that has lost its

salience in a new cultural
context ˜ Mr. Wenner has decided to embrace changing

readership habits rather
than to outrun or ignore them.

    The magazine
has been graphically updated by its new art director, Andy Cowles,

who previously worked at
Q, a British music magazine. But it still has a

tendency to lavish attention
on aging rockers like Mick Jagger.

    Mr. Wenner
remains unapologetically involved in the editorial affairs of Rolling

Stone, although company
executives and editorial staffers say he has given wide

latitude to Ms. Fuller at
Us Weekly as she remakes the magazine into a

star-driven weekly for women.
Mr. Wenner said that Mr. Needham would be given

similar permissions to remake
the magazine he founded.

    “He has
great qualities. He has a demonstrated track record as a modern magazine

packager and those trumped
everything else,” Mr. Wenner said.

   
Reached in Colorado, Mr. Thompson, whose articles defined the early version
on

the
magazine, was among those surprised by Mr. Wenner’s hiring of Mr. Needham.

“It
seems as if he’s in dire straits. Has it really come to that?” he said.

    Others
think the choice of Mr. Needham makes sense.

    “It seems
when people are trying to develop media vehicles for young people,

they are going for the shorter
attention span,” said Lawrence Teherani-ami a

media director at Wieden
& Kennedy, an advertising agency that represents

companies like Nike. “I
don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with

that. I just hope that Rolling
Stone keeps its heritage of being the source of

great reporting on youth
culture.”

    Mr. Needham
studied American literature at Sussex University but came of age

professionally and personally
in the laddie magazine world of England. After

working as a freelancer,
he became deputy editor of the British FHM in 1996 and

editor in chief in 1997.
The owner of FHM, the British publisher EMAP, then

selected him to edit a new
American version of the magazine.

    Despite
Dennis Publishing’s having a three-year head start with Maxim, FHM has

rapidly found reader and
advertiser acceptance with the classic laddie

fundamentals of pictorials
of relatively obscure celebrities, jokes and

tutorials on how to be a
modern man.

    “The
overlap between FHM is pretty slender ˜ Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez
˜

but I respect the magazine
enormously,” Mr. Needham said of Rolling Stone. “It’s

a magazine that is very
faithful to its traditions, perhaps to a fault, and

there has to be a bit more
crafting of the magazine to make it a success on a

very brutal newsstand.”