Rolling Stone, General McChrystal, and the Collision of Old and New Media

Rolling Stone magazine has done a lot to keep us interested over the years. They have a knack for making news with their covers, editorial or even their advertising—you can still read about their Perception/Reality campaign in the annals of marketing. And who can forget Dr. Hook’s musical complaint when they failed to make the cover of that publication?

So when the lady from NPR called to ask my opinion on the current Rolling Stone/General McChrystal fiasco I wasn’t sure I could get all there was to say about it into a sound bite.

From a newsstand perspective—and let’s get that out of the way up front here—it’s all good. Really. Even though the article in question, about General McChrystal and his incendiary comments about his bosses, the US government, is wholly available on line, and not yet released in print. No matter. You can’t buy the kind of publicity that Rolling Stone has gotten over the past couple of days, and I’m surprised that some bloggers appear to be raising the question that fewer people will buy a copy because the article in question. People are thinking and talking about Rolling Stone more than they have in years; and lots of people are going to look for it and buy it—way more than if the article hadn’t been released, way more than if the storm hadn’t blown up. There are those who will buy it for its collectible value alone at this point.

From a new media/old media standpoint, though, the whole thing shows a creakiness that indicates that a) the size and news-worthiness of the story caught Rolling Stone by surprise and b) they haven’t quite gotten up to their full comfort level with having a foot in both camps.

What’s this with releasing the full story (which leaked its way out to Politico and Time) without being prepared with their own online posting? That does seem surprising. Still, I work with lots of publishers that won’t acknowledge the importance of the impulse-driven consumer traffic to their sites. It’s like the magazine cover itself for many publishers—kind of beneath serious editorial notice, even somehow undermining to the seriousness of editorial intent.

So, Rolling Stone let two other news organizations scoop them—and the article was already making its own news by the time they got it up on their site.

Then there’s the downplaying of the time lapse. It took a couple hours to shape it up and get it up—the day AFTER it was already available, in full, online. I can understand the error, but less the stance that the error was unimportant. Sure, print is creaky—after all, it takes three weeks to get a publication from the printer to the newsstand. But guys, this leisurely pace is barely working anymore for old media. In the online world, we have to pick it up a bit, yes?

Then there’s that whole argument about do you want to get your whole article, your entire publication, up on line, in essence duplicating the newsstand, or do you instead want to send out sound bites of your own,
nibbles to whet the appetite of readers and fans, bring them to the website for some of it and to the newsstand for the feature version. That’s hardly, though, what the brouhaha is about this time around though, and while many publishers continue to vigorously argue one side and another, we all know that it takes more resources to summarize and excerpt and change—to in fact create what Don Nicholas of Mequoda has called “minimum information units” (or MIN) than it does to just send it out, as is.

Oh, and by the way, who is it on the cover of the General McChrystal Rolling Stone? It isn’t the General, and it isn’t Dr. Hook. It’s Lady Gaga.