| « Back to Article |
Rolling Stone closes last S.F. office
PUBLISHING
James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am, Saturday, April 18, 2009
Former Rolling Stone writer Ben Fong-Torres in 2007 Photo: Chris Stewart, The Chronicle
This is a scene from 2000 movie "Almost Famous" showing the set for the Rolling Stone magazine office. Photo: Columbia Pictures
1981 Rolling Stone cover featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono.**RETRANSMISSION FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND INCREASED FILE SIZE**This photo supplied by the Magazine Publishers Association and American Society of Magazine Editors shows the Rolling Stone magazine cover from Jan. 22, 1981, depicting John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which was voted the number one cover from the last 40 years, as decided by judges in a contest by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the group announced Monday, Oct. 17, 2005. The photo was taken by photographer Annie Liebovitz in December 1980 on the last day of Lennon's life. (AP Photo/Magazine Publishers Assn and American Society of Magazine Editors) Photo: Anonymous, AP 1981
2002 Rolling Stone cover featuring the Simpsons in an Abbey Road knockoff Photo: Rolling Stone, AP
A group of Rolling Stone editors and staff members, including Ben Fong-Torres (standing left), watch President Nixon resign on television on August 8, 1974. The photo was taken in the magazine�s San Francisco office at 625 Third St. Photo: Courtesy Of Ben Fong-Torres
Printable Version
Email This 
FontRolling Stone magazine has severed its last tenuous link to San Francisco, the city where Jann Wenner co-founded the irreverent biweekly 42 years ago to cover the psychedelic rock scene and counterculture movement flourishing in the region.
New York publisher Wenner Media will shutter its three-person office at 1700 Montgomery St., spokesman Mark Neschis said. It housed one Rolling Stone sales representative, who will relocate to Los Angeles. The other two employees, a Men's Journal representative and an assistant, are being laid off.
"There wasn't enough business to justify having a full-time office in San Francisco," Neschis said. "It's a challenging economic environment."
Indeed, the magazine's ad pages dropped nearly 17 percent in April compared with the same issue last year, according to the Mediaweek trade publication. Men's Journal is faring even worse, with ad pages down 39 percent over last year. In recent months, Wenner Media has conducted several rounds of layoffs across its titles, which also include Us Weekly, according to media reports.
"They're being caught in the same maelstrom, although somewhat less so, as newspapers," said John Morton, a media analyst with Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. "They're looking for ways to save money."
In truth, Rolling Stone fled its native city years ago. The company moved its headquarters to New York in 1977 and closed the last San Francisco editorial bureau in the early 1980s. On his way out of town, Wenner told The Chronicle that San Francisco was "a provincial backwater."
In the early years, however, there was a symbiotic relationship between Rolling Stone and the city, said Ben Fong-Torres, who joined the magazine as an editor in 1969.
"It was one of the energy centers of the cultural, rock 'n' roll scene of the mid- to late '60s," he said. "For Rolling Stone to be in San Francisco gave it a particular strength, a singularity. Of course, we also naturally nurtured our own scene here. We gave a lot of attention to local bands."
An early issue featured a spread of a drug bust at the Grateful Dead's studio on Ashbury Street, he said. It regularly reported on San Francisco acts such as Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Co. and the original Charlatans.
"It was just natural because they were in our backyard and we saw them all the time, at the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom and also clubs like the Matrix," Fong-Torres said.
Because of the magazine's permissive style and generous length allowances, it attracted established members and fostered emerging talents within the "new journalism" and "gonzo journalism" movements, in which writers used fiction devices to tell nonfiction stories or inserted themselves as central characters in pieces. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Tim Cahill, P.J. O'Rourke and Greil Marcus all contributed to the magazine. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe wrote for Rolling Stone as a teenager, an experience upon which he loosely based the movie "Almost Famous."
"It was the only place to go for a long time, particularly on the West Coast, if you were in the business," said Lowell Bergman, a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and producer for "Frontline" on PBS, who worked at the magazine until it moved to New York. "Especially if you wanted to write something that was long and may be seen by a lot of people."
Rolling Stone was as well known for covering politics and culture as it was for music.
Thompson wrote freewheeling, and pharmacologically enhanced, dispatches for the magazine on the presidential campaign of 1972, focusing on George McGovern's doomed bid and the character flaws of Richard Nixon. The articles were compiled in the book "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72."
Timothy Crouse's reports for the magazine on the same campaign turned into "The Boys on the Bus," the seminal work on the phenomenon of pack journalism, the tendency of reporting to become homogenous. The book is often assigned in journalism schools.
In subsequent years, Rolling Stone has been criticized for losing its edge and identity, as it sought a younger audience with shorter stories and more coverage of mainstream bands and celebrities.
"In the years to come, Jann Wenner got himself a jet and a home in the Hamptons. The world changed," Bergman said. "It still continued to do (serious journalism), but its focus moved more in what we call a pop culture direction."
