Size no longer matters for Rolling Stone
October 25th, 2008 by Wade Tatangelo in News
It was with mixed emotions that I pulled the new Rolling Stone magazine from my mailbox on Thursday. On one hand, it pleased me to see Barack Obama’s smiling face on the cover. On the other, it saddened me to see the mag, the one I have read more often than any other during my lifetime, had shrunk. The larger format had stood for four decades. I have a hard time throwing away periodicals and have boxes of the large format RS’s dating back to last decade tucked away in my closet. On slow nights, I still peruse them.
“The adoption of a standard format could boost single-copy sales and reduce production costs for advertising inserts such as scent strips and tear-out postcards,” reports the AP (which also offers comparative pics of the old and new formats). “The magazine says any cost savings, though, will be offset by the inclusion of more pages and the shift to thicker, glossier paper.”
Rolling Stone boss man and founder devoted a page to explaining the move.
“With this issue, we’ve changed to a new format, reducing our size to the dimensions of the classic magazine and exchanging staples for ‘perfect binding,” writes editor and publisher Jann Wenner on p. 16. “In the trade-off, we’ve improved our paper quality and invested in additional pages to expand every section of the magazine — more music news, extra pages of Random Notes, more reviews and more space for our award-winning features and political cover.”
To Wenner’s credit, the new issue is fat with interesting reads. This morning I was enthralled by the 9-page piece “The Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” about the gifted author who recently killed himself. I followed that with a short, interesting Lou Reed Q&A. Next, I read the mag’s take on the new AC/DC, which I reviewed here, and got hip to the newly leaked Conor Oberst single “I Got a Reason #2 (Live).” I’m looking forward to digging into the Obama interview, the Blitzen Trapper profile (I reviewed their new disc here), the Lucinda Williams profile (I reviewed her latest disc here), and the article “The Nomad Warriors of Ethiopia.”
My point? I’ll miss the old RS format. But it’s still my favorite mag.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
[...] More here: Size no longer matters for Rolling Stone [...]