Rolling Stone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rolling Stone launched on the 9th of November, 1967, with a cover photo of John Lennon dressed for battle in a Brodie helmet, fresh from the set of How I Won the War. The cover price was 25 cents. Jann Wenner, its founder, had borrowed $7,500 from family and the parents of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim, to get the first issue off a press that produced tabloid-sized pages in black ink with a single color highlight. What could a magazine born on a shoestring in San Francisco, built around rock music, possibly become? The answer would stretch across decades of American life. Rolling Stone would publish Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, give Tom Wolfe a deadline to finish a novel, and place Annie Leibovitz's photographs on more than 140 covers. It would break stories that brought down a general, spark lawsuits that cost millions to settle, and survive a wrenching change of ownership. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a counterculture music sheet become a political institution, and what happened when its ambitions outran its judgment?

• 2. Founding and the Name

  ›

  Wenner explained the magazine's title in that very first issue, writing: "The name of it is Rolling Stone, which comes from an old saying, 'A rolling stone gathers no moss.' Muddy Waters used the name for a song he wrote. The Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy's song. Like a Rolling Stone was the title of Bob Dylan's first rock and roll record." The origin has been contested ever since. Some writers have attributed the name solely to Dylan's hit, while Rolling Stone's David Browne wrote in a 2017 anniversary piece that the title was a nod to all three sources simultaneously. What was less ambiguous was the magazine's attitude toward its counterculture neighbors. Rolling Stone kept a deliberate distance from the underground newspapers of the era, including the Berkeley Barb. Wenner wanted traditional journalistic standards, not radical agitation. He described the project as "sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper", and the slogan that would eventually define it, "All the news that fits", came from early contributor Susan Lydon, who lifted it from an April Fools' Day issue of the Columbia Daily Spectator, itself a parody of The New York Times. One reader described buying his first copy on arriving at college as a "rite of passage".

• 3. Writers Who Shaped It

  ›

  Hunter S. Thompson first published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone in 1971, and he stayed on as a contributing editor until his death in 2005. The 1970s also saw the magazine launch careers that would define American letters: Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, Joe Klein, Joe Eszterhas, Ben Fong-Torres, Patti Smith, and P. J. O'Rourke all passed through its pages in that period. The 21st of January 1970 cover story on the Altamont Free Concert and the killing of Meredith Hunter won a Specialized Journalism award at the 1971 National Magazine Awards. Later that same year, David Dalton and David Felton published a 30,000-word feature on Charles Manson, drawn from their interview with him in the L.A. County Jail while he awaited trial. That piece won Rolling Stone its first National Magazine Award outright. Wenner then turned to Tom Wolfe in 1972, assigning him to cover NASA's Apollo 17 moon launch. Wolfe's four-part series, "Post-Orbital Remorse", ran in 1973 and examined the depression some astronauts felt after returning from space. The assignment spiraled into a seven-year project that eventually produced The Right Stuff in 1979, with Wolfe pausing along the way to write The Painted Word in 1975 and Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine in 1976. Annie Leibovitz began shooting for the magazine in 1970 and became its chief photographer in 1973, her images ultimately appearing on more than 140 covers.

• 4. Moving East, Shifting Focus

  ›

  In 1977, Wenner moved Rolling Stone's headquarters from San Francisco to New York City, describing his original home as "a cultural backwater". The relocation signaled a wider repositioning. Through the 1980s the magazine ran an advertising campaign called "Perception/Reality" that contrasted symbols of the 1960s with those of the 1980s, and it drove a notable increase in advertising revenue and pages. Wolfe came back into the fold during this period. He wrote to Wenner proposing the idea of serializing a novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Wenner offered him around $200,000. From July 1984 to August 1985, a new installment appeared in each biweekly issue. Wolfe later said he was unhappy with what amounted to a "very public first draft", thoroughly revised the text, changed his protagonist Sherman McCoy, and published it as The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. By the 1990s the magazine had shifted format again to chase a younger readership drawn to television, film celebrities, and pop music. Critics described the result as emphasizing style over substance. A resurgence came in the late 2000s through the work of Michael Hastings and Matt Taibbi; Taibbi's 2009 reports on the financial crisis, including his description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid", became some of the most quoted journalism of the year.

• 5. Controversies and Judgment Failures

  ›

  The August 2013 cover featuring Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, then accused in the Boston Marathon bombing, generated immediate backlash. Boston mayor Thomas Menino sent a letter to Wenner stating that the cover "reaffirms a message that destruction gains fame for killers and their 'causes'" and that "the survivors of the Boston Marathon deserve Rolling Stone cover stories, though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them." Retailers including CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Kmart, and Walmart refused to carry the issue. On the 19th of November, 2014, the magazine published "A Rape on Campus", a story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. Separate investigations by the accused fraternity Phi Kappa Psi and by The Washington Post revealed major errors and omissions. Managing editor Will Dana apologized on the 5th of December, 2014, and the magazine commissioned the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate. The story was retracted on the 5th of April, 2015. UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo filed a $7.5 million defamation lawsuit. A jury found Rolling Stone, its publisher, and reporter Sabrina Erdely liable on the 4th of November, 2016, after 20 hours of deliberation, awarding Eramo $3 million. The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity separately sued for $25 million; Rolling Stone settled out of court for $1.65 million. Two years later, Rolling Stone gave Sean Penn final editorial control over his 2016 interview with drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Andrew Seaman of the Society of Professional Journalists called the arrangement "inexcusable". Penn himself later acknowledged the piece "had failed".

• 6. Ownership and Survival

  ›

  After the rapid rise of the 1970s, the magazine experienced prolonged financial strain in the 21st century. In September 2016, Wenner sold 49 percent of the title to Singapore-based BandLab Technologies, with BandLab having no direct involvement in editorial decisions. In December 2017, Penske Media Corporation acquired the remaining 51 percent from Wenner Media. Penske then bought out BandLab's stake on the 31st of January, 2019, gaining full ownership. The magazine converted to a monthly schedule beginning with the July 2018 issue. The print format itself had changed many times over the decades: the tabloid newsprint of 1967 gave way to four-color newsprint in 1973, glossy large-format pages in 1980, a standard 8 by 11 inch size on the 30th of October, 2008, a return to the 10 by 12 inch large format with the 2018 monthly relaunch, and a redesign with new exclusive fonts and a grittier paper stock in June 2024. The magazine spent $1 million on a 3-D hologram cover for its 1,000th issue on the 18th of May, 2006. In August 2025, Sean Woods and Shirley Halperin were named co-editors in chief, with Halperin also becoming the magazine's first female editor-in-chief and its head of music.

• 7. Culture and Legacy

  ›

  The Beatles have appeared on the Rolling Stone cover more than 30 times, individually and as a band. The cover from the 22nd of January, 1981, featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono, has been called the "Greatest Rolling Stone Cover Ever" by Vanity Fair. The magazine's reach extended well beyond its pages. Cameron Crowe's 2000 film Almost Famous drew directly from his own teenage years writing for the magazine in the early 1970s. Shel Silverstein's song "The Cover of Rolling Stone", first recorded by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, satirized the hunger for that cover slot as the ultimate marker of rock stardom. George Harrison referenced the magazine directly in his 1975 song "This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)", written in response to unfavorable reviews of his 1974 North American tour and his album Dark Horse. In fiction, Stephen King's novel Firestarter has its protagonists choose Rolling Stone as the outlet to take their story to. By 2026, the magazine was running 16 international editions, from Rolling Stone Africa published by the Mwankom Group in Lagos, Nigeria since 2024, to Rolling Stone Canada relaunched in January 2026. The first international edition, Rolling Stone Australia, had launched all the way back in 1969, a reach the original $7,500 investment could not have anticipated.