Rolling Stones National Review Magazines Megasplat!

Like an unwatched pot, my beat has boiled over. Serves me right for turning my jaded eyes away. None of the current crop of news bits changes the static nature of the direction of history whatsoever. We are witnessing the death of magazines as an art form. We are a $100.00 Kindle away from seeing all of print dry up and blow away.

On the other hand, the same was once said about the cassette tape and the LP, both of which have stayed on despite the wide popularity of much more advanced forms. So I could be yodeling mournfully for nothing. But things don’t look good.

That print brands continue to have some value has been demonstrated only unevenly. The various Dot.coms, playing at the novelty when they were truly novel struck out with their own minted brands. I am old enough to remember when Dell was the name of a publisher and the Amazon was a rain forest.

So people chucked their Chicago Tribunes for a daily reading fix found on Yahoo. Or blew off the news entirely for the personal babble sphere of Facebook or LinkedIn. What we are seeing now is something of a swing back to the mean: people spending their reading time reading what people who are paid to write have to write. That’s the actual trend in play—and it could be rare good news for those brands previously associated with professional writing.

The trend has been led by LinkedIn, the Facebook for the overly serious set. There are only so many eyes that can be drawn with newsgroup pleadings (disguised recruitment and trade school ads), peers endorsing the talents of peers and other filigree networking. So the fathers of LinkedIn have taken it in the direction of business journalism. The first steps were purely of the vanity variety, giving selected CEO ‘Commit to Life-Long Learning’ of the Minutes platform to wax plagiarisms to his wannabes. (Jack Welch.)  Given how little many of these aged wind-chimes really knew and how poorly they have able to convey it, it was only a small leap to bringing in the paid for hacks. This is where LinkedIn is now. The next step is to make the site a multi-industry trade journal, with broad sections for strategic topics and splinter sections for specific industries. One can only hope this leads to more cash spent for real writing, but we shall see.

If one really wanted all of that, wouldn’t one be better off with a dollar an issue subscription to Forbes or Kipplingers or Bloomberg Businessweek? Certainly if I wanted to start a service competing with LinkedIn, hanging a marquee like Crain’s or Financial Times might gain my cyberspace some instant credibility. This has the smell of going full circle. The trend is the migration of reading habits to online or on tablet. The trend is the bifurcation of society, the increased specialization of the economy. Those are the drivers of change here. Social networks themselves are just a toy, the internet version of the crossword puzzle. Once eyes are drawn they will migrate to the best meat made by the best butchers.

It never happened on the old Yahoo home pages. Like the majority of local newspapers, Yahoo and HuffPost are largely shovelware for the wire services. The switch in reading is the same for the same—or the same for free. It’s the ‘for free’  part that made the newspapers gag, but that’s something of an illusion. The Yahoo front page and Google make their livings the same way all print does—through advertising. Our current distinct downdraft in such has made the threadbare newspapers and the free onlines duplicates of each other. When I last checked, the starting wage for a reporter at one of our fine Chicago newspapers was $13.00 an hour. That puts a potential reporter’s love of writing in contest with her love of eating—and the products reflect that. Neither Chicago daily is worth the pittance or bother to be involved with it. And Chicago is hardly a break in market.

That said,  the economics of newspapers has finally bottomed out, at least as valuable trademarks. Hence the Boston Globe has been eaten by the Red Sox—coverage of local sports being one of the few things to distinguish a shovelware container of wire service copy from its online brethren. And the Washington Post has been eaten by the Amazon, not the jungle. And jaded eye plutocrats circle the Tribune’s properties, but only the money losing print ones, since those are the only ones the Tower of Tribune is willing to sell. The previously bankrupt Chicago Tribune will keep its radio stations and fractional ownership of the CW/WB TV Network, thank you.

It’s an odd world indeed wherein a business is willing to sell its namesake business, the Chicago Tribune, but not its real-estate, nor television or radio holdings. (Its station’s call letters,  WGN, stands for World’s Greatest Newspaper.) It would be a move for diversification if all of these entities weren’t equally luddite and in the exact same business. All radio and TV and newspapers are advertising platforms.  And they are all equally backwards as assets. Since when is TV so wonderful to be in? My Time Warner and Disney stock prices say otherwise. GE loved TV so much they gave NBC away, Rachel Maddow and all. Radio, the original declining medium, may still be a license to print money, but that’s only for as long as there are so many slots on the spectrum. An object carried around by every single adult is about one common generation away from expanding the number of nationally available radio stations to infinity. But by all means, keep the TV and radio stations and give away the Tribune trademark. Soon all you will have left to sell is some riverfront condo space.

Not that anyone will miss the Tribune as a media actor. The former owner of the Chicago Cubs is the Chicago Cubs of media. Split from the whole, one doubts how much of any of it will survive for the next five years. Or which parts of it will survive in any form, if history is our guide. Radio did survive, it seems, long past its use by date. Right before it degenerated into background noise for driving, radio DJs combated other media distractions by staging stunts. This stunt focus actually started in magazines, specifically our pals the pulp magazines. But it has become a staple of magazines in general. On occasion these stunts backfire wildly. Which brings me to the Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone has existential issues beyond being a magazine. It was forged to cover the field of Rock & Roll music, a form that died out twenty years ago. Its tangential beats, the music industry and youth culture, both evaporated. And the aging staff of the magazine has yet to figure that out. Prior to putting this suicide bomber on the cover, they featured a fifty year old actor who is currently portraying a superhero sidekick in the biggest flop movie of the summer. So their reputation as blind, tin eared and atrophied is well established.

The most newsworthy part of this magazine’s little take on the Boston suicide bomber was its ham handed attempts at damage control. I honestly don’t think it was an attempt by the Rolling Stone to get itself yanked from CVS and other drug stores. Rather, it was an oddly packaged puff piece, commissioned  by an elderly group of editors so out of touch that they didn’t know any better. This is the same group which has put out flippy books in the past—so uncertain of their subject matter that they put the magazine out with two front covers, half of the magazine printed upside down to accommodate this. Only Rolling Stone, coloring books and imported porn have tried this tactic in modern times.

Being largely phoned in is a Rolling Stone trademark. This issue was no different. If financial writer Matt Taibbi isn’t featured, there’s no reason to bother with Rolling Stone. (How Taibbi got orphaned at Rolling Stone is accident of history—recent history being shaped by arcane financial events it takes a certain flair to explain.) Mostly Rolling Stone contents itself to fill the void once occupied by the Movie Fan magazines of old. There’s a pipeline of geezer promoters who largely dictate what gets covered and how. And Rolling Stone was coming off a traditional lull period, the issue after its summer double issue. Asleep at the switch and knowing that what was about to be published would die its usual mid Summer newsstand death, some clueless grey head slated a mass murderer for the cover.

It blew up in their face. It might have been worse, if they weren’t published by their main distributor. Like Weider Magazines and Playboy, Rolling Stone is not actually a magazine publisher at all. It is instead a packager, flinging entries for processing via the thing that ate the National Enquirer, a firm called American Media. The twice bankrupt American Media prints Rolling Stone and distributes it to grocery store chains. Thus the copies yanked by CVS and other pharmacies were simply displaced to American’s other outlets.

Playing up the slight bump in sales was probably Rolling Stone’s second stupid move. Walgreens and CVS didn’t make any money by having to yank a magazine. That the magazines were sold elsewhere will not inspire the inconvenienced outlets to hold open retail slots, either. And kiss off the Boston market for the next decade.

Of course the real damage won’t register for a few months. I’m not entirely sure the beer, liquor, bubble gum and fashion fragrance advertisers paying Rolling Stone’s freight are going to be all that enthusiastic next ad buying session. And that is death.

In the end, they did trot out Matt Taibbi, who did his best to defend his brain dead patrons. Despite its numerous in print protestations to the contrary, the Rolling Stone self-inflicted a mortal wound. And they know it.

As a subscriber to Rolling Stone I’m not inclined to cancel as yet. But I’m a hard core Mag Hag, so I don’t count. To really tick me off to the point of never wanting to bother with you again, you have to go the way of the National Review.

I don’t normally cover all of the magazines I subscribe to, especially my flotilla of think mags. This blog is most distinctly not about politics and most think mags fall far outside of our pulp magazine beat. But these guys have really pissed me off on several levels.

I am a long term subscriber to the National Review. I’m not going to say if I’m a neo Nazi skinhead dog whistle loving plutocrat boot licker, but I will cop to being fond of snarky writing. And no one brings the snark better than the nits and wits at National Review. That the magazine was partially founded by former pulp digest king Alex Hillman endears it to me further. (Hillman is covered on our HIL-GLE.com website.) In many ways it is a kin to the American Mercury, another magazine with pulp ties. As absorbed as I am in its history, it takes quite a bit for me to divorce myself from it entirely. But I have to.

The fact of the matter is that National Review did not survive the death of its founder. And it has gone the way of American Mercury. It is plainly hate literature, of no value to reason whatsoever.

Wobbles in quality began immediately. The founder understood that the Conservative movement is a tightly run thing. Pruning the movement of its weirdo elements is Job One—and the National Review’s cause for being. National Review is actually the third (or fourth) attempt at raising an independent Conservative masthead. Had William F. Buckley, Alex Hillman and the others wanted to be mouth pieces for polluting industries, race haters, plutocrats, narrow religion, vote riggers, arms absolutists or conspiracy theorists, they could have stayed at the publications in which they were originally affiliated.

Apparently there was a need to be loose from all that easy to find a sponsor for crap. After much deliberate effort and suffering on all parts, the standard that was the National Review rose.  It defined the Conservative movement, to a proprietary degree. They kicked the John Birch Society out. They were the first to call Ayn Rand what she is—a Nazi. And libertarians were held as the unrefined boobs and nabobs that they are. Lest we forget, National Review has been out to repeal the drug war for two decades now. And when George W. Bush’s weaknesses in leadership became apparent, it was Buckley who lamented the lack of a mechanism for promptly terminating that administration.

Today’s National Review is nothing more than a  flack for the worst of the right wing extreme. Some of this started on Buckley’s watch, specifically in its minor leagues, NROnline. Always Pro-Life, the Review has drifted into the subculture of Creationist Promotion. That seems to have opened the door to fringer loons of all stripes, including home schoolers, home machinegun makers, anarchists and the cheering section for every corporate tax avoider out there.  Distrust of statism as a method for solving all of society’s ills has degraded into blood lust against the concept of the state itself. A movement which counts such books as What Price Wall Street? as a foundational document, now spouts apologies for the misbehavior of obvious internal information exchangers and cartel puppeteers. It has become reflective of a world that I have very little in common with and no aspiration to join. Worse, most of this dreck is being pounded out for this select consumption by a group of well educated rich kids who have never had to work a day in their lives.

The Review never was much more than a tool of the idle rich to begin with. In its first inception, it shared refinements, extrapolated on the value of traditions and attempted old style magazine style to transmit and engender a love of the things it loved. Perhaps it is the staffing or perhaps it is the times or perhaps it is the state of its movement, but I find little to love in pretexts for taking away the right to vote and less to love in cheerleading home brewed automatic weapons. You’ve creeped me out. And that’s the end.