Rock idol, movie star and presidential candidate cited Bob Dylan – not the tech giant – as Rolling Stoneshares in trade. Wenner knew Steve Jobs and noted some similarities — when they met in the early 1980s, they were both long-haired Dylan fanatics who had disrupted their fields — but the two never really successful now. “We had a common professional disagreement about the future of print journalism,” says Wenner. “Turns out he was right.”
I have my own story about Jobs and Wenner. When I interviewed the co-founder of Apple about Macintosh coming soon Because Rolling StoneJobs told me that he lobbied to get the Mac team on the cover, a request Wenner refused. “Jann is making a mistake!” Jobs told me. When I presented this to Wenner this week, the autobiographer said, “God, I wish I could remember that — I put it in the book!” (One of the Norman Seeff’s photo take for my 1984 story finally became a Rolling Stone spread, 27 years laterwhen Jobs died.)
Wenner’s view of technology today is colored by his anger at how the network has killed the traditional magazine business model. In his book, he talks about the Internet as “a vampire with hundreds of millions of tentacles without a tether, a ubiquitous iPhone.” He wants it regulated. “I think internet players literally stole all the intellectual property of the journalism world without compensation of any kind,” he said. “They repackage it, give it away for free, and sell it to advertisers for less. It’s cold-blooded, it’s sterile, and it’s cruel. We died on the floor. “
On the other hand, he loves streaming. “Music is everywhere,” he said. “I listen to it on my Sonos system, anything, anytime. It was unbelievably wonderful.”
Despite his reservations about the internet age, Wenner admits that starting a tech magazine might not be the worst idea. But the combination of his lack of interest in the subject and his company’s exhaustive list of other titles worked against it. “I guess I didn’t have the bandwidth or the time or the interest at the time. We have started Outside,” he said. “I really don’t feel we could come up with another magazine. I wish we had.”
However, Wenner had the opportunity to play a role in a startup technology publication. He told me that WIRED co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe had once approached him about being a minority owner in what they used to call Rolling Stone of technology. Wenner flew back to his hometown of San Francisco and visited the WIRED offices, just a block away Rolling Stoneold headquarters of. “It looked exactly the same – everything except the computer,” he said. But he pulled through, in part because he felt there might be a clash in philosophy. Instead of just focusing on journalism, Wenner thinks WIRED should be a more product-centric magazine, like the Ziff-Davis publication. PC Magazine. “I feel that there will be a lot of advertising to go with it,” he said. (Metcalfe confirmed the visit. “He comments on how tall people are and how short the people in his office are,” she said.)
