Tim Sprinkle

Rolling Stone’s Nonmusical Side

Everybody knows about Matt Taibbi by now, right? Rolling Stone's story on Gen. McChrystal this week is just another example of the "more than a music magazine" side.

Eric Bates, Rolling Stone's editor, concedes that "there's still this lingering sense that you're a music magazine and what are you doing over in Afghanistan? I call it the 'of all places' syndrome." But he said that view is changing after the biweekly magazine's stinging stories on such topics as the BP oil spill and the Wall Street bailout.

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The 43-year-old magazine can rightfully claim a history of outsider journalism, going back to Thompson's drug- and alcohol-fueled binges. Timothy Crouse's observations of reporters on the 1972 presidential campaign became the classic book "Boys on the Bus." Tom Wolfe's articles on NASA's original seven astronauts led to the 1979 book "The Right Stuff." Evan Wright was embedded with a Marine unit during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his stories became a book and then the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill."

The coverage can be overheated and politically loaded, but it is not restrained. "They give you an enormous amount of space to address any topic I want, and there's no editorial interference in terms of political viewpoint, and I can use any language I want," says Taibbi.

Bates sees Rolling Stone going back to its roots. "In the last 10 years," he says, "the magazine has returned to form and made it a point to go after abuses of power."

Wenner offers a simple explanation: "We're not a public company, afraid of whatever the implications of that may be. We're independent. I own it."