Issue 1077 of Rolling Stone: the smallest ever?
We have a free, lifetime subscription to Rolling Stone magazine…otherwise I would never bother to pick it up. But since it’s there in the bathroom every morning, it gives me some good blogging fodder while I’m doing my regularly scheduled pit stop.
Back in October of last year, Rolling Stone magazine changed their format for the first time in nearly 40 years, shrinking it down from their over-sized pages to a glossy, standard format.
While I still think their content is complete Liberal crap — constantly promoting thug and drug cultures, promoting teenage sexual promiscuity and drug use, and the deranged hatred of women and Conservatives. Especially Conservative women — the new format makes reading their crap-tastic magazine a bit easier.
But when I picked up their April 30 issue #1077, something just seemed different…the magazine just felt so much more insubstantial than usual…
I checked the garbage bin and found a few of their past issues and realized that slowly but surely, Rolling Stone magazine is shrinking again…but this time it’s the page count.
The Incredibly Shrinking Rolling Stone
The only other back issues I still had on hand were:
- Issue 1066 from November 27, 2008: 142 pages
- Issue 1067 from December 11, 2008: 110 pages
- Issue 1074 from March 19, 2009: 94 pages
- Issue 1077 from today: 74 pages
So, what’s going on over at Rolling Stone? Tough economic times? Falling ad revenues? People getting tired of reading their liberal Bush Derangement Syndrome when they were simply looking for a review of the new Kings of Leon album?
The rag used to be a premier music review magazine. But now they seem to devote just as many pages to bashing Conservatives and President Bush — even though he’s no longer in office — and bad movie reviews as they do to pimping music that is being produced by actual pimps and gangsters.
This week’s issue has this as the top headline on the cover (from completely unhinged political “reporter” Matt Taibbi): The GOP’s Obama Hysteria (I’m trying to find an article about the Democrat’s Bush Hysteria over the last 8 years in Rolling Stone…but haven’t found one yet…).
A quick glance at their Television section finds their TV writer, Rob Sheffield, comparing (unfavorably of course) the sitcom The Office with the failures of President Bush and Conservatives.
Hey, Rolling Stone, President Bush is gone. Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. Let the hate go.
Is it any wonder the rag appears to be disappearing (literally) from circulation?
Layoffs at Rolling Stone
So I did a quick google search to see how things are going at RS:
From Gawker back in December of last year:
Rolling Stone just laid off several more staff, including Online Editor Kyle Anderson, a tipster informs us. Other casualties include another editor, an assistant and a fact-checker. The cuts come one month after Wenner Media shed online, marketing and advertising staff, plus the entire offices in San Francisco and Detroit. They pave the way, we’re guessing, for CEO Jann Wenner’s exciting new RollingStone.com revamp, for which he’s just hired a “Chief Digital Officer” from — wait for it — Reader’s Digest, that bastion of online innovation. Steve Schwartz’s stodgy pedigree should fit in well with Rolling Stone’s steady slide deeper into irrelevance, and with old-man Wenner’s vision of the internet as the place where that process can continue, only faster
And from Gawker again two weeks later:
Rolling Stone overlord Jann Wenner forgot to do some layoffs in his last round, two weeks ago, so he just fired some more people, less than a week before Christmas.
This article from SFist says that Rolling Stone is down 21.6 percent in ad pages for 2009.
I won’t mourn their complete and imminent collapse…in fact, I’ll do a little happy dance when it does happen (at their current page count decline, I’d say that might happen sometime around June of next year…)
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I didn’t even notice, I guess because I stopped paying attention to RS a long time ago. That is hilarious. I doubt I will miss them either. Good article.
They’ve changed formats before. Many, many, years ago, I was at a cafe and found that someone dumped all these old RS Magazines beginning with issue #1. If I had swiped them, I would be rich now. Instead, I stayed up all night (it was a 24 hour cafe) reading them. They were a lot better back then.
Aww…isn’t that tragic.
(rubbing right hand index finger and thumb tips together over left shoulder – symbolizes the world’s smallest violin)
I don’t pay money to be offended and insulted.
Clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about so let me enlighten you. First of all, the magazine was not always a premier music review magazine, it was always political (read the first issue with John Lennon, it’s all about Vietnam). So the magazine has not, as you say, gone downhill. Rather, you just have a problem with the content because you are a republican nutcase who can’t understand why people might still be mad about Bush. We’re STILL dealing with reprecussions of his actions in office, so it’s not like, get over it, he’s gone now. He left behind a lot of damage that the liberals now have to clean up. Secondly, the magazine has 1.4 mil circulation, so regardless of what you think, they’re sticking around. Just because you and five people (who commented on here) don’t like it, doesn’t mean all those other people are going to stop buying it. Oh and lastly, Matt Taibbi has won numerous awards for his writing so say whatever you want, but he is great at what he does. Maybe you’re just jealous because no one reads your stupid blog and he’s getting awards left and right. Next time you want to rant about something, how bout you learn a little about it’s history first, hm?
LOL, was the last post by ‘Anonymous’ in fact written by Matt Taibbi or maybe his mom? Where did Taibbi win numerous awards? I see on Wikipedia that he won a National Magazine Award in 2008 but I don’t see other ‘numerous awards’.
Rolling Stone is looking downhill. The magazine gets smaller all the time. It’s like a box that is shrinking and the clowns trapped inside get more vociferous and mean with every article. Soon they will be crushed HAHAHAHA.
There were four main articles in this issue of Rolling Stone, the rest of the space was taken up with tidbits and advertising and they have the gaul to charge $4.50 for that?! No wonder things are going downhill for them.
It’s not just Rolling Stone. All magazines are downsizing due to the economic downturn. I seriously doubt it has much to do with the content of Rolling Stone. Don’t be a retard.
And lastly, I enjoyed this issue because I’m tired of Democrats taking it up the ass while Republicans trash them and their policies. The GOP sucks a big fat one, and it’s about time the Dems started sticking up for themselves and exposing the GOP as a vapid party for old white bastards.