“One conversation we had before Noah took the job was whether I’d be prepared to back tough reporting when the inevitable complaints came,” Wenner told me. More significantly, Rolling Stone wrote a critical piece about country singer Morgan Wallen, reminiscent of Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold’s Pulitzer-winning investigations of Donald Trump’s claims of his munificent charitable donations.Īfter Wallen, while seeking redemption for being caught on video uttering a racial slur, pledged $500,000 to Black-led organizations, Rolling Stone contacted dozens of such charities and found somewhat scanty evidence of Wallen’s follow-through.
Magazines haven’t always been so forthright in flagging the best parts of a story typically, Shachtman said, “that news would have been left to readers to unearth by themselves.” But that approach is a relic of print for online readers, if the good stuff isn’t in a headline and part of an intense social-media push, they might never see it.
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When Lindsey Buckingham was out promoting his new memoir, Rolling Stone’s interview was more provocative than most and Shachtman’s team sold it hard on Twitter: “Lindsey Buckingham compares Stevie Nicks to Trump and his former Fleetwood Mac bandmates to timid Republicans.” Success: Matt Drudge picked it up on his heavily trafficked website, and the piece found hundreds of thousands of readers. It’s a “more immediate, more visceral” presentation, the kind of approach that the Internet demands.Īt the Daily Beast, Shachtman drove digital traffic, often by finding the sexiest element of a story and going hard with it - in headlines, in the lead paragraph, and certainly on social media - and by aggressively breaking news, such as revealing that Mary Trump was the source of her uncle’s tax returns going public or how sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was running a dicey secret charity. Though its political coverage has historically been hard-hitting, Rolling Stone was once among the music press that treated the industry’s biggest stars with a certain amount of reverence.īut it’s not just tougher stories that Shachtman wants. In doing so, he wants Rolling Stone to stand apart from much of entertainment journalism, which “tends to be either fawning and borderline embarrassing, or pure gossip.” “We are 100% going to shine a light on bad actors,” he told me, as we walked through Rolling Stone’s Midtown headquarters, where a dazzling video wall rotates through a history of magazine covers: Mick Jagger, Madonna, Bruno Mars, Beyonce and, of course, Clapton. “That’s not true now, but we’re on the road.”Ī milestone came this summer when Wenner, the 30-year-old son of magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, hired a new editor, Noah Shachtman, who had previously been the top editor at the Daily Beast.
“Our North Star is re-establishing Rolling Stone as the Bible for young people,” he said.
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