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Rolling Stone, Playboy, TV Guide and Reader's Digest defined their times. Now editors and publishers are trying to redefine them for a new generation of readers. BY LISA GRANATSTEIN
Leaning back in his chair, and looking like a man who's heard it all before, Jann Wenner ticks off the grief he's gotten for tinkering with 35-year old Rolling Stone. "I got flack after issue five for putting color in the logo. I got flack when it became four color, and I got flack when I put a fucking staple in the magazine," recalls a mildly amused Wenner, the pop-culture bible's editor in chief. "People are change adverse. If you ask them, they want to leave it comfortably the way it is. But some of us, like myself, like change."
Controlled chaos may be more like it. This year, Wenner, whose company Wenner Media also publishes Us Weekly and Men's Journal, replaced all three of his top editors, and all three titles are currently undergoing transformations. But it was his decision this summer to lift a page from the trendy laddie books-those young men's magazines with babealicious covers-that touched off the latest round of rebuke. To some, it appeared as though he had abandoned Rolling Stone's storied past in favor of some vapid future. To Wenner, sharper, shorter, more timely pieces, with a renewed emphasis on music, was the smart way to go.
"We're responding to an overall change in the media landscape, and an overall change in the way people use and consume media," explains Wenner. "Rolling Stone was getting kind of sleepy. We needed to kick it in the ass, if you want the shorthand."
Wenner has given Rolling Stone a swift kick when the times called for it. A stroll through his offices is a history lesson in publishing. Magazine covers, stacked seven high and snaking down a long hallway, let visitors trace how Rolling Stone evolved organically with the times it chronicled-from its start in November 1967 as a quarterfold on newsprint, to its color tabloid format in 1974, to its a new logo in 1978.
"That's part of [Wenner's] genius," says Danny Goldberg, a former Rolling Stone contributor and chairman/ceo of Artemis Records. "He's restless; he cares. He keeps focusing...