A few words about Rolling Stone Magazine

Almost from its onset, Jann Wenner who created the magazine and who is still the publisher, was determined to publish serious, cutting edge journalism on politics and culture in this country. He was equally determined to foster new talent, and that's what RS has done from Hunter Thompson to Michael Hastings and Matt Taibbi. There's a reason that RS published Michael Hastings story on General McCrystal.

Many folks know about Hunter Thompson's affiliation with Rolling Stone; less people know that Rolling Stone's first political editor was Richard Goodwin, who headed up the Washington bureau. Goodwin wrote the war on poverty speech of 1964 for President Johnson. He was an advisor to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and special counsel to Kennedy.

Rolling Stone, like the New Yorker, has always let writers write long, often quirky articles about any number of things often from an unusual perspective.

It still publishes some of the best articles on politics and culture that can be found in the media.


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But what eventually made Rolling Stone special was its writing. Wenner got great writers when they were young and true and had energy to match his own. Then he gave them time and freedom and space. He made many of them famous. So great were their numbers, so prodigious their talents, that there became almost a Rolling Stone school of writing. Early on he recognized the skills of Greil Marcus, Michael Lydon, Jonathan Cott, Jon Landau, Charles Perry and Ben Fong-Torres, and photographers Annie Leibovitz and Baron Wolman, and put their work alongside that of outside writers like Richard Brautigan, Anthony Burgess, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and William Burroughs. Many of them had moved on by 1973, but by then, the next wave of Rolling Stone writers, led by Hunter S. Thompson, was going to work. Wenner brought in Joe Eszterhas, Timothy Crouse, Joe Klein, Tim Ferris, Howard Kohn, David Weir, David Felton, Tom Powers, Tim Cahill and Michael Rogers. He brought the brilliant British travel writer Jan Morris to Rolling Stone, and he sent Tom Wolfe to cover the final flight of the Mercury Space Program for a story that came to be called “The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff.”

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http://www.jannswenner.com/Press/Jann_Wenner_Is_Gulp_40.aspx