Rolling Stone: Jann Wenner

After being involved in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, Jann Wenner wanted to start a publication to capture the exploding counterculture scene of the 1960s. The result was Rolling Stone, a gritty music magazine that – for 50 years — has left an indelible mark on rock music and journalism. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Cleveland resident Joel Crites created the app Micro Fantasy, a game where fans can make mini-predictions about what will happen next during a baseball game. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  We made a big mistake in our editorial processes. I was sick about it. I mean, 50 years of great journalism and a reputation for integrity and for quality and all that stuff, and then there was a couple of really bad judgment calls that were made on a very sensitive story, and it blew up in our face. That was probably the biggest one. That was. Always there's this one thing that happens.

• 0:30Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:43Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Jan Wenner took sex, drugs, and rock and roll, packaged it into one of America's most iconic magazines, and built a publishing empire out of it.

• 1:00Guy Raz?

  The thing you've probably noticed about the people who've been on the show is they all saw an opportunity and they took it. Sure, there was luck, there was hard work, failure, persistence, all of that. But the difference between, say, Sarah Blakely and the rest of us is that in the 1990s, she saw an opportunity to improve women's undergarments, and she seized it. Rod Canyon saw an opening to make better personal computers in the 1980s, so he built Compaq. And for Jan Wenner, he was also in the right place at the right time. In the mid-1960s, he was a student journalist at UC Berkeley, right at the time when San

• 1:41Guy Raz?

  Francisco and the Bay Area were becoming the center of youth culture in America. But just being there wasn't enough. What Jan Wenner did was to capture the moment, to take that energy and create a gathering place for young people, a magazine that spoke to them in their language.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  San Francisco was a small, you know, a small town then.

• 2:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Not all I could say. And a little off the beat of mainstream America, yet at the same time, it's that beautiful, picturesque town which was very tolerant of... Uh, social behavior that was a little off the center and the arts community was a little off the center. So preceding the rock and roll scene, uh, and the hippies in San Francisco, there were the beatniks. It was the

• 2:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Eric Valen Ginsberg and Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and they all found a home in San Francisco, you know, and as did people like, uh, Lenny Bruce. So it had a thriving beatnik, alternative lifestyle community and so therefore was extremely tolerant of the rock and roll groups that were springing up, were even weirder than the beatniks and, uh, had a coffee house scene and, uh, and that was consistent with San Francisco's long history of being tolerant of, uh, different kinds of political movements and artistic movements.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's interesting because of course there were, there were pretty strong student movements at Columbia and in, and in Boston, but I mean, San Francisco, Berkeley, that was the center of, of student activism in, in America, arguably in the world at that time.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah. I mean, Columbia came several years after. That was 1968. So I think it really started in the San Francisco Bay area. It was accompanied by, uh, at the very early days of the civil rights movement. So a lot of students were going off on marches down south and participating in those kinds of things. So I think political activism amongst students really was generated in the San Francisco Bay area.

• 3:35Guy Raz?

  Was it exciting, an exciting time?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, cause you know, they're full of commitment and passion and, uh, sense of possibility and, uh, the post-war baby boom just starting to come of age, starting to become college students and sensing that there was their turn on stage and it was their right or responsibility to try and make America stand up for and, and behave in such a way as that were, we were taught in school, America's ideals, uh, were about.

• 4:03Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Liberty, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

• 4:07Guy Raz?

  Tell me, tell me how you met Ralph Gleason. Because he would, of course, figure very prominently in the founding story here. But tell me, who was he and how did you meet him?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Well, Ralph Gleason was a jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to covering jazz, he would write about some rock and roll things. Dylan, Beatles, Stones, stuff like that. And he was one of the few voices around anywhere in the country and in San Francisco that was saying, hey, there's real merit to these artists, to Dylan and to the Beatles. And what they're doing is important, it's musically important, and it's culturally important. So as a rock and roll fan, I would read that, his three times a week column. So he was somebody you paid close attention to. And I met him at a rock and roll show in San Francisco, I think, once.

• 4:55Guy Raz?

  Do you remember what show?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  It was called A Tribute to Doctor Strange.

• 4:58Guy Raz?

  And you just went up to him and said, hey, I'm John Winter.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. And then he said, I know who you are. I've been reading your column in the Daily Californian.

• 5:05Guy Raz?

  Wow. Were you blown away that this famous jazz critic was?

• 5:08Speaker 00

  I sure was. Because I impartmed my column after him. So we chatted and stuff like that. And then subsequently, you know, met a couple more times or had lunch or something like that, or kept seeing each other at dances and became buddies, you know? And also, I got the sense that he was taking me under his wing and he liked what I was doing, thought I was bright and energetic and, you know, enjoyed the company.

• 5:31Guy Raz?

  How much older was he than you?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  I was probably 20 at the time and he was 40. So he was an adult to me. He was a grown up.

• 5:39Guy Raz?

  And at what point did you say to him, hey, why don't we start a magazine together? What's the story? How did that even, how did the conversation even begin?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Well, he kind of looked after my career. I went after, in the summer of 65, I was in London, living there as just a kind of wild-eyed kid. And when I came back to the States, I was looking for a job and I asked him if he knew of anything. He said he did. There was something available, something called Ramparts Magazine in San Francisco. Why didn't I come back? And he got me that job.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And Ramparts Magazine itself was a very, was a left-wing investigative journalism magazine. I was in charge of that tender age of the arts entertainment conference, which since I was in charge leaned heavily towards rock and roll and hippie culture. So much of the stuff that it would end up in Rolling Stone.

• 6:34Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  And after that job ran out about nine months later, I was kind of at a loss of what to do. I was 20 years old at the time, or 21. And, you know, no career training, no immediate job prospects.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  So did you go back to Ralph for help?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Well, we were very, we were big friends. So I was looking to Ralph for kind of career advice or guidance or something to do with him, since we were so in simpatico and in sync about the way we saw the world. And we tried a couple of different ideas, you know, edit a book, do an anthology, you know, something centered around music. And I guess he or I said, well, why don't we start a publication about it?

• 7:16Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  And, well, it was a high bar to get over, but a low bar, I mean, it was going to be a newspaper, a newsprint. So it wasn't going to be any kind of full-scale magazine launch or anything like that.

• 7:27Guy Raz?

  And was going to be focused on rock and roll?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  On rock and roll.

• 7:30Guy Raz?

  Was there anything like that in 1967?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Nothing like that.

• 7:34Guy Raz?

  So help me understand this, Jan. This guy, Ralph Gleason, a notable, well-respected jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, young man but middle-aged, has enough confidence in a 21-year-old kid to say, yeah, I'll start a rock and roll magazine with you? I mean, it does sound implausible now, doesn't it?

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Hmm. I don't know. I mean, we got along really well, and we shared the same vision. And he had, when he was young, started a publication called Jazz Quarterly, which was somewhat the same, a fan's magazine about jazz. So I think he probably saw in me maybe a younger version of himself.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  He saw its possibilities, and he saw that I had some kind of level of talent and ambition that might be able to bring something off. He even gave me money for it.

• 8:26Guy Raz?

  What was the ambition? Did you guys sit there and say, we are going to make the biggest magazine in America?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  No. I mean, I don't even know if we knew what the biggest magazine in America was.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  But that wasn't part of the ambition. The ambition was to do something that was new and fresh about the music. And rock and roll was no longer, you know, dance time. I mean, it started to have some very serious musical and political content and social content. I mean, and these were people who were starting to articulate a kind of rebellious stance towards society. They were concerned about, you know, like Dylan was writing a lot about alienation and the Beatles were writing a lot about kind of social mores and how people should be treated. And these were themes that were beginning to resonate deeply with a new, young generation of which I was on the leading edge of.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  So Ralph says, okay, let's do this. He has a little bit of cash to put in?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  He had some cash to put in and I got some $2,000 from my mother and from my mother-in-law to be and some money from a college friend of mine and also from my stepmother. And that assembled together was $7,500 and that was what we started with.

• 9:44Guy Raz?

  And what, I mean, what did you do from that point? Did you assemble a staff? Did you start to write articles? Did you have to find a place that was going to print? Because starting something today, you could just put it online. But then, I mean, finding a printer, I mean, that's expensive. That's an expensive proposition, right? Distribution.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it was all complicated. Not too expensive, but we needed to find offices. So we went to the printer that we had used at Sunday Ramparts, agreed to give us offices upstairs in our printing facility, since we were going to print the magazine there. We assembled friends of mine and people I met at Ramparts, or people I know from Berkeley, or other people writing about the rock and roll scene, and asked them all to volunteer their efforts to write articles or take pictures or help put it together. So it was really a volunteer effort.

• 10:30Guy Raz?

  And how did you come up with the name?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  We kicked around a lot of names. The one that kept sticking was Rolling Stone, the Dylan song, Like a Rolling Stone. And it was the title of an essay that Ralph had written for a small publication called The American Scholar, in which he laid out his thinking about the meaning of rock and roll and what its importance was in the new American, developing American society.

• 10:58Guy Raz?

  And just walk me through this in 1967. I mean, because today, of course, there's lawyers and there's LLCs and there's documents of incorporation and there's equity splits. Did you have to do any of that or was it just fly by the seat of your pants?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  It was fly by the seat of the pants. I mean, we knew nothing about magazine publishing and distribution. I had a vague understanding what editorial was and what it should be like and knew how to write and report. Ralph had some experience with the record companies. And it was just write up, assemble it, print.

• 11:34Guy Raz?

  But, I mean, you were creating a business. Did you, how did you even know where to start?

• 11:40Speaker 00

  I had no clue. None. You know, it was just, we paid what we could pay for, the money we had on hand and that would be as far as we'd go. And since we weren't paying salaries, weren't paying rent, our only cost really was printing the paper and the cost of distributions, which I wasn't even aware of until two or three months later when all these trucking bills kept coming in.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  You know, it's like, oh, my god.

• 12:05Guy Raz?

  So from the time that you raised that $7,500 to the time the first issue came out, what was, how long did that take?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  About three months, two months.

• 12:14Guy Raz?

  That's fast.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  We were fast on our feet.

• 12:18Guy Raz?

  And, and so what was the, tell me about the first issue. What was, what was in it?

• 12:22Speaker 00

  John Lennon was on a cover, a photo of him as Private Gripweed in a movie, How I Won the War.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And that came out, not that we sent out somebody to take a picture of John Lennon, but just whatever free publicity photographs were flying around at the time, we were looking for something and there was a package of, of pictures for that movie was just coming out. And we just took that one of John and dressed up as a soldier and it turned out to be brilliant. And he, when looking back at it, the choice of John Lennon for cover of our first issue was, you know, more than fortuitous.

• 12:55Guy Raz?

  And what was inside? Were there reviews of shows in San Francisco?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  There was a couple of reviews of shows in San Francisco. The big thing was we did an investigation to what had happened to the money that had been earned at the Monterey Pop Festival. Had it been given to charity or not. So we looked into that in a long report and kind of established right then and there that we were going to do very traditional journalism.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Okay. So, tell me about just getting the articles in and the deadlines. Were your writers going out and making deadlines? And were you working around the clock to get this thing out? Was it a weekly? Was it a monthly?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  It was every other week, fortnightly. Well, we had very few writers and it's very hard to push them too hard if they're all volunteer. If you're not paying anybody, you're asking them to do things. But everybody's imbued with the same spirit and enthusiasm for it. And, you know, people really pitched in and did it. And we were able to get that thing out every two weeks without fail from then on out.

• 13:53Guy Raz?

  I mean, I'm assuming that you, despite the fact that you were in the center of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, you know, culture, you kind of couldn't really take part in that too much because you had to run a magazine. You had to publish that magazine.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Well, how can I answer that question? You could do both. But really, one has to sacrifice for the other. I mean, once it gets going and you're trying to print something every two weeks, you really have no time to think of anything but the next day, more copy, more stories, and all the little things that go into it. I mean, I was the mailroom as well as the editor.

• 14:31Guy Raz?

  And how did you fund it? Did you have to also put, of course, ads, I'm assuming, right?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Well, we tried to sell ads and we'd get a few ads here and there at the beginning, but there was not much revenue in it. You might get $500 an issue in advertising at the beginning.

• 14:44Guy Raz?

  So how much runway did you have with that $7,500?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Well, it's hard to know because as that would... Go out, then we'd start getting some monies in from selling it at new stands. And there'd be checks from that and checks from advertisers. And then people might be start subscribing, paying $5 a year or something like that. So, you know, there was enough to keep it going. And sooner or later, we hired our first employee who received $25 a week. And by the end of the first year, we were a viable business with three or four people being paid, getting it out regularly, selling 30,000 or 40,000 copies an issue. People were responding to it. The record companies were liking it. We were getting letters and correspondence and recognition from various artists.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  In the first year, we published a long interview with Pete Townsend, interviews with Mick Jagger. So it was making, it was gathering momentum. People liked what they saw.

• 15:39Guy Raz?

  Did you have that advantage because you were the only magazine like this out there?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Well, yes. Nobody else was trying to do this. I mean, the primary mainstream press didn't care at all about this particular corner of American culture or give much credence or thought to the idea that there's a kind of a booming new generation about to take over, that the baby boom was going to have some kind of big impact. I mean, at that time, still, music was looked down upon as teenage nonsense or ephemeral, to say the least. Them by people look really strange and long hair, you know, not really acceptable people. But nonetheless, music was the kind of tribal telegraph, the drums that were beating for young people around the world, where they could kind of communicate with each other and see what other people like them around the world were doing.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And so this is the way young people communicated. There was nothing else.

• 16:35Guy Raz?

  So do you remember what, when the magazine started to get attention? Was it year two, three? Like, when did it start to become something people would just talk about?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Well, the first time we got a lot of attention was on the first year anniversary. We printed the cover, the band Two Virgins cover of the album that John Lennon and Yoko Ono did together, one that shot them in backsides and then a picture of them completely naked. So we ran those on our first anniversary issue, and we got an article about ourselves in the San Francisco Chronicle, our first press, which was, the headline was Nude Beatle Perils SF.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  But we had, we sold out the printing, we printed more, and it just kind of got more and more people talking. And then, I think in year two, we did a big specialist show on groupies. And that got us more attention with a photo portfolio and a big report about girls who follow bands around and all the stuff that's associated with that. And that, I think, led to an article in Time Magazine about us. So, we're starting to get a little on the national radar then. You know, sales are kind of picking up in different big cities around us. It kind of spreads by word of mouth. And then, finally, we made a deal with more of a national magazine wholesaler, rather than the company in San Francisco, and started appearing more and more around the country. The more we appeared, the more people liked it.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  More subscriptions came in, more revenues came in. So, we felt we really had a going business, you know, after the first year. I don't think we had a question about survival at that point. We felt committed and on the road.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  Tell me how you came across Hunter Thompson, because I think it's fair to say he was your first really big breakthrough writer.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  I had knew Hunter's work before I started Rolling Stone. He had written a book called The Hells Angels. And so, I just wrote him a letter after I'd started Rolling Stone, asking him to write something for us. And he wrote back saying, geez, he'd been really reading Rolling Stone. It was terrific and great, but he'd love to write, but he couldn't write now because he was busy, involved in running for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. So, I wrote him back and said, well, why don't you write about that? And which he did, and which we published a couple of months later. It was called The Battle of Aspen, or Freak Power and Iraqis. And, of course, the idea that he was running for sheriff of Aspen caught an enormous amount of attention, you know, in media places around the world. And all of a sudden, he was inundated with reporters and film crews from New York, from

• 19:04Speaker 00

  London, and so forth like that. And so, that was, you know, like, once again, it started just our reputation growing more and more.

• 19:12Guy Raz?

  So 1972, I mean, I was a huge fan of Hunter Thompson's work when I was, especially when I was younger. And, I mean, you assigned this guy to cover the 1972 McGovern campaign, a serious presidential campaign. Was any part of you like, maybe this is a little risky? This guy is, you know, he's kind of, he used a lot of drugs and he's a little bit nuts and maybe this isn't-

• 19:39Speaker 00

  No, maybe I think that's what it took. I mean, by that time, Hunter had written a couple of serious, deep investigative pieces for us on, like, East LA and the Chacona movement there. He had, we had done Fear and Loving Las Vegas, and he had become our star writer, star reporter. So I was always on the lookout for what would be the next great thing for Hunter to do. So the election comes along. This is the first time the 18-year-olds were franchised to vote. It was in a war situation, so it was an anti-war election. And Hunter had this kind of political background, having run for sheriff and being very, having actually covered Nixon years before. So it was just kind of a natural thing. And I mean, American politics, why not send out an expert on the Hells Angels

• 20:22Speaker 00

  to do American politics? It makes sort of sense.

• 20:28Guy Raz?

  In just a moment, why Rolling Stone ditched San Francisco for New York, and how it became the most influential music magazine in the world. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 21:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the early 1970s, and Rolling Stone is starting to get a lot of national attention. And at this point, it's operating out of a brand-new office, and the magazine even starts to publish in color. And they just assigned Hunter S. Thompson, the brilliant, acid-dropping gonzo journalist, to cover the 1972 presidential election.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Well, nothing says that you can't take acid and cover an event. Maybe even better than without acid.

• 21:46Guy Raz?

  But I mean, that wasn't traditional journalism. It was a radical way of...

• 21:50Speaker 00

  No, but you had, I mean, look, if you're trying to make a presidential election at that time interesting to young people, and people had basically turned off the political process, you have to engage them again, make it kind of colorful and interesting. And McGovern was an interesting personality. And Nixon at that time was clearly a well-defined villain. So it was kind of a setup for doing really good writing and reporting. And everybody else, the traditional coverage of it was bloodless. And Hunter went in and broke all that apart and became the most compelling writer and reporter on that campaign, as everybody well acknowledges.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  What was he like to work with? I mean, was he reliable? Was he...

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Reliable is not one of the words.

• 22:33Guy Raz?

  Erratic? I mean...

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Well, Hunter took a lot of what we call handholding. I mean, he was erratic and he was, you know, moody and energetic and all over the map. But he was also a professional, a superb reporter, a brilliant writer, a deep sense of responsibility about things. And though he would work until the very last minute deadline and almost drive you crazy and bring you right to the edge, in the end, he always delivered. You could always count on him to do so. So I was, I had a great time. I mean, it took a lot of my time. It was draining, an exhausting thing to do. But the net effect was, we produced a brilliant piece of work in terms of covering the entire election. And it was also one of the key things

• 23:18Speaker 00

  that really finally put Rolling Stone on the map in a big way. You know, everybody in the press corps was reading, everyone in the campaign was reading it. And people around the country were riveted by what he had to say. But by that time, we were a pretty serious rock and roll magazine, pretty widely respected. It was starting to get a lot of advertising, a lot of advertising from record companies. And we were on our way.

• 23:39Guy Raz?

  So that was it? I mean, there were no growing pains?

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Well, after about three years, we went through a real rush with running out of money, which lasted a couple of months because we had moved offices in San Francisco from rent-free loft in a printers place to a big, you know, expensive new expansive office and then all the overhead that entails. And we were spending money without really thinking about it. And all of a sudden, we realized, oh, my God, you're going to run out of money. And we had switched to a big national distributor. And so all of a sudden, our print room was like 300, 400,000. And once we got through that, we started, you know, professionalizing our management. I mean, really actually bringing in people who are CPAs or had accounting degrees or had some reasonable business background to kind of manage things and keep track of

• 24:25Speaker 00

  the money. And over the years, that just got more and more professionalized. But I mean, once we moved, when we moved to New York in 1977, I mean, that really was, you know, finally, you know, was really hitting the big time.

• 24:38Guy Raz?

  Why did you, yeah, why'd you do that? Why'd you leave San Francisco in 77?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Well, we were, you know, the company by that time was split into half of it in San Francisco and half of it in New York, where we had a lot of ad salespeople, a lot of writers, a lot of editors. And so it was clear we had to do it in one place. And it was clear also the magazine business was in New York. So if you want all the resources of talent, they were available in New York. That's what the industry was. So it was kind of a no-brainer that that's what we would do. And we went and did it and ended up on Fifth Avenue.

• 25:10Guy Raz?

  At the time, Jan, you were quoted as saying San Francisco is a cultural backwater, and that's why we're moving. Did you, was there some truth to that? Did you really feel that?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. I mean, there was that heyday when we started, which had not only this thriving rock and roll culture and this thriving youth culture, but a thriving political culture and all the left stuff and the black pants and all sorts of things were happening first in San Francisco. But sort of by the time we moved, kind of New York was starting to have its moment again, starting to come back to life a little. And we arrived just at that time when Mailer was around and Andy Warhol was around. And then, San Francisco wasn't so much a cultural backwater. It was just provincial, you know, it was out on the coast.

• 25:52Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  It was off of the mainstream. It wasn't putting out this big, unique culture thing in music anymore.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  You know, Jan, I'm trying to get my head into, I'm trying to sort of get myself into that, into that New York office in the late 1970s. Rolling Stone was basically espousing a kind of counterculture aesthetic. But you were the boss. I mean, you were the man. So how did you balance running a counterculture magazine, but also being a boss? And kind of having to be probably a jerk sometimes to people who weren't, you know, productive or whatever?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it wasn't too difficult. I mean, really, first off, I never quite believed in a counterculture, or call it that, an alternate culture, maybe. But definitely, you know, you had certain value systems of trying to do good and trying to be fair to people instead of being kind of ruthless. Money only is the only thing that counts. So it was always a bit of a balancing act. But I think everybody quite understand that they, everybody wanted to get paid, you know? If you had families, you wanted to support them. So I don't think anybody really deeply questioned the need to have a profit ethic and a professional ethics. I mean, there were some outside critics in the early days of people, "Oh, your principles are this, but you're a hippie capitalist, and it's kind of a contradiction. How can you stand for both?"

• 27:12Speaker 00

  But I mean, it's stuff that wasn't, nothing I really paid attention to.

• 27:17Guy Raz?

  And at that point, were you, did you start to really get interested in the business side of things? Were you looking at P and Ls? Were you looking at the bottom line? Were you doing that, too?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Well, again, I wasn't myself doing it. I was always, had somebody there as CEO or CFO, who's, who had the day-to-day responsibility for all that. And that person would report to me, and I'd look at it and overs, you know, have oversight over it and try to understand it and try to give directions, strategic advice. But I didn't have control of the day-to-day operations on the business side. I controlled the editor. But when you're involved in something like, in that stage or something like that, when things are growing all the time and getting better and more and more money is coming in, you don't have to be too tough to manage that, you know? You're the victim of success from outside, you know? It just, it kind of...

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Brings you along, the true test of how tough a businessman you are, how true it is when things are not going so well.

• 28:16Guy Raz?

  Was there a time after your move to New York where things were not going well with the magazine, financially?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Well, we had spent, came up, we had spent a lot of money moving and moving to fancy new offices and all this kind of stuff. At the same time, I'd started a new publication called Outside and left that in San Francisco. And there came a point where it was just too much to be carrying both magazines. So I sold Outside magazine.

• 28:39Guy Raz?

  And did you, did you sell it for a profit?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  I sold it for about what I put into it. But I couldn't afford to be sustaining both magazines at once.

• 28:48Guy Raz?

  Did that, did you feel pressure to, I mean, a magazine today, of course, is not as, it's a different business than it was in the late 70s. But did you have sleepless nights over whether, you know, you're going to make payroll and you guys are going to...

• 29:02Speaker 00

  No, no, no. By the time, by the time we moved to New York, it was fully up and operating. I mean, Rolling Stone was getting to a circulation of 1 million copies. When you've got a circulation of 1 million, you're, you were a solid, stable business with a lot of money coming in.

• 29:15Guy Raz?

  Did you ever have to find additional outside investment, funding at any point?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  After that, no.

• 29:21Guy Raz?

  No, you were totally self-sufficient?

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:24Guy Raz?

  So tell me about your, I mean, how you started to grow, because Rolling Stone was this thing, this, your baby, and Outside you had bought and sold, and then you moved on and started to buy other publications, right?

• 29:35Speaker 00

  No. We started Us Weekly and we started Men's Journal. But Rolling Stone grew because it was so good. And because it was so relevant to people's lives, it gathered a big, big readership, and the advertisers followed.

• 29:49Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, I guess at a certain point, a lot of the, sort of the criticism of Rolling Stone at that time, and you know this, it wasn't, it was about things like the things you would cover, right? And you're focused on trying to grow the magazine and make it relevant, and some people would say, "Well, you didn't cover disco," for example. You were, you missed the punk movement. Like, is that, was there any truth to that?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  No, there was no truth to that. We were right on the punk movement and right on disco, and people hated disco. They hated us for covering disco. And other people hated us for covering punk. But we would always get critics, that's good to have, you know? Our philosophy was, we're going to stay with... The news or what's of interest to people and what is currently going on popular culture, we're going to cover it as leading edge. And sometimes popular culture is terrible. Sometimes it's good.

• 30:49Guy Raz?

  But I mean, at a point in time, like, you could have, I mean, it was a very smart, I know you didn't do it for this reason, but it was a very smart and lucky move to get into publishing because that enabled you to make a lot of money. Whereas today, it's a different, it's a different story.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Well, if I was 21 today, I doubt I would consider magazine publishing. People are looking, all, are looking to go in something digital, you know, whether it's digital delivery of food, or digital delivery of news, or how to hook up, or, so, if one wanted to do a magazine today, my counsel would be just, make it a small, make it a small magazine, and make it so that it's supported by its readers, not by advertisers.

• 31:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But I mean, content is, there's so much free content today compared to when, you know, the heyday of Rolling Stone.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  Right? It's, it's a different beast now. I mean, you, your content that you, that people have to pay money for, they may not get as high quality content for free, but there's a lot available, right? So it's a tougher-

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Well, there's, there's a lot available to distract everybody in every single way. Every possible kind of entertainment. So to find people actually sit and read, there's a shrinking number of people who would find magazines that vile. But having said that, we still have a huge readership, you know, of a million and four right now.

• 32:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I want to just read a list of, some names of Rolling Stone alums. Hunter Thompson, of course, Joe Klein, Cameron Crowe, Joe Estras, P.J. O'Rourke, Annie Leibowitz, Lester Bangs, Matt Taibbi, William Greider, Kurt Loder, Michael Hastings. Incredible list of people. What's the story? How do you find people? Do they come to you? Do you, are you just good at identifying good people? Are you lucky? How did you get these writers?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's a combination. If some people approach you, you seek other people out. You're always on a search for talent, and always open to it. That's what put Rolling Stone over. It wasn't- My brilliant management of it, it was the fact that we were publishing such great stuff. I just have a instinct for talented people and how to work with them. And thinking back, Ralph, we used an interview with somebody once, said, "The proof of how good an idea Rolling Stone was is that it survived Jan's management of it."

• 33:06Guy Raz?

  Because you were a crappy manager of it, or what?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  I was a 20-year-old kid. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't out to make a big buck, and I certainly had no business background.

• 33:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  You know, I had ambition and energy, and a good idea, and a great idea.

• 33:22Guy Raz?

  You know, Jan, of all those names I just read, only one of them, of course, is a woman. Annie Leibovitz, one of the most famous celebrated photographers in the world. But I wonder, if you had a chance to do it again, do you think, I mean, a lot of the great writers that you brought in were men, would you have, would you have worked harder, do you think? I mean, it's a different time, of course, but do you think you would have worked harder to bring in more women?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Well, it's not that you'd work, we were just looking for talent, in whatever shape or form it came in, man, woman, of any color, any shape, any size. It didn't matter to me. But it's just that the general society just didn't produce great women journalists at that time. There were a few who wrote for The Times, but not many who wrote in our area. We would go after women as is as anybody else. We'd publish Nora Ephron and Alan Willis at that time, later on Gloria Emerson. We had a great group of women editors at the center of the office.

• 34:21Guy Raz?

  Patty Smith, you published Patty Smith?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  We published Patty Smith. And today, we've got three or four really superb women writers, Janet Reitman, Alex Morris. And we were just talent-based, you know? So if you were talented, you had a place. We wanted you. We didn't look beyond that.

• 34:40Guy Raz?

  I've read that at a certain point you had a falling out with Hunter Thompson. Can you tell me what happened? What do you remember about that?

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Well, I never really had a falling out with Hunter. So I can't really tell you that anything happened. All I can tell you is that Hunter liked to go around talking about how awful his bosses were. You need to always have a villain, a foil for his writing. And if nobody else was available, Nixon was not available, somebody else, then it was me. And I just took it with good humor. But we were very fast friends for years.

• 35:14Guy Raz?

  And did he, I mean, I guess he didn't really write much for the magazine, sort of in the, you know, his heyday was the 70s, right?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  That's correct. I mean, after the campaign, a few campaign-related pieces like about Watergate, he just became unproductive and remained so for many, many years.

• 35:32Guy Raz?

  Was it just because of his lifestyle?

• 35:34Speaker 00

  I think it was because of his lifestyle, yeah, exactly. That's a polite way of putting it.

• 35:39Guy Raz?

  Did you keep in touch with him until he died?

• 35:42Speaker 00

  We were always in touch, you know, frequently and frequently, you know, we always knew each other's doing. We'd talk often. I was always trying to get him to write something else, something else. And finally, in the 90s, he came back and he wrote two wonderful pieces, huge, long pieces, Fear and Loathing, and Elko, and one about the Pulitzer, the Roxanne Pulitzer Trial, which were great pieces of writing.

• 36:04Guy Raz?

  You know, Jan, we were just talking about your management style, and I'm curious about that because, I mean, anyone in your position is going to have haters, right? And of course, you know, and of course, loyal, you know, soldiers and people who love you and people who absolutely just despise you, right? I mean, that's normal, right?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Right. But I have to dispute the fact that I've got a lot of bad people, people don't like me or think I'm a jerk. I mean, sure, there's criticism, but I think my reputation is more for being fair and being equitable and reasonable with people, being a tough and demanding boss, absolutely. But I don't think anybody would say that is unfair, you know, or mean or cruel. What I've learned about managing people is that you want them to be happy with what they're doing. You want smart people. You want loyal people. Loyalty counts a lot. But people, if they're unhappy in their job, won't do a good job. And I believe you should treat people justly and fairly. I'm not tough in that manner, but I'm not, I don't shrink

• 37:02Speaker 00

  too much. When a decision has to be made, it has to be made. I'm one for second chances. I've always given people second chances.

• 37:15Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about a pretty big crisis that you guys had around the UVA story, the story about, that you published a few years ago about a rape on campus at the University of Virginia, in which the central story turned out to be false. And that was a big deal. I mean, that was national news. So what was the situation like for you guys at the magazine at the time?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  That was difficult, but not an existential crisis. We just made, I mean, I'm not allowed to talk about it. We settled the lawsuit, the principal lawsuit with it. And we're just, I'm allowed to say it was an amicable settlement. All I can say is, we made a big mistake in our editorial processes.

• 37:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And obviously, I understand that there's details you can't talk about, but what you are able to talk about, how did that, I don't know, how did that affect you personally? Did you?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  I was sick about it. I mean, 50 years of great journalism, and a reputation for integrity and for quality and all that stuff. And then there was a couple of really bad judgment calls that were made on a very sensitive story. And it blew up in our face. But the general report on rape on campus was quite accurate. It illustrated the main story of the rape victim. That was made up by that rape victim. And we printed that without adequately checking it.

• 38:37Guy Raz?

  But as you know, as a journalist, it's enough, right? The minute you get something wrong, the rest of it doesn't matter.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Sooner or later, you're going to get something like that, whether it be New York Times or the Washington Post.

• 38:48Guy Raz?

  Was that the, because it seems like, up until that point, I mean, of course, every publication is going to make mistakes. And you guys have had your mistakes over the years. But I mean, it seems like that was probably the biggest one.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  That was. Always, there's this one thing that happens.

• 39:08Guy Raz?

  Do you still own-- you own 100% of your company, right?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Myself and my family own 100% of the company.

• 39:15Guy Raz?

  Is its value publicly a public thing?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:18Guy Raz?

  You keep that private?

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:20Guy Raz?

  But upward of, let's say, Winter Media, upward of a quarter million dollars?

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Whatever you want to say.

• 39:28Guy Raz?

  I mean, would you ever sell it?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  You know, who knows? I mean, in the heyday, Rolling Stone was a fortune, you know? That heyday is past, you know? But I don't regret having not sold it in the heyday for the most you get out of it. I went on to have another 10, 15 years of delightfully running my own company and my own magazine and not working for anybody else.

• 39:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  And when you sell it, you end up working for somebody else and they have every right to tell you what to do. And I'm just not a person who kind of likes to be told what to do.

• 39:58Guy Raz?

  You are 71.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 40:01Guy Raz?

  You started this magazine 50 years ago.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 40:04Guy Raz?

  Are you-- you still go in every day?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Pretty much, yeah, every day when I'm here in New York. I'm gone about four months of the year, five months of the year.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  So when do you-- when do you stop being involved with Rolling Stone, ever?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. As long as I can make a good contribution to it, which I think I still do editorially, I can still feel when I go in and have an idea that I've got good story ideas, I've got good instincts on what a story should be and shouldn't be and where a lead is in a story like that. And as long as I can make those kind of contributions and come up with story ideas, then I'm happy and delighted and want to be there to do that. The minute I see I'm kind of like failing and coming up with ideas, everybody's looking at me going, "What? This is an old man thinking." Then I think I'm being backed off.

• 40:50Guy Raz?

  Jan Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine. And if Jan made it seem like he doesn't have a plan for Rolling Stone's future, that is not entirely true. Jan's 26-year-old son, Gus, is poised to take over the family business when Jan steps down. In fact, Gus was the one who wrote us and said, "Hey, you should put my dad on the show."

• 41:25Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things that you're building.

• 41:35Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And this week's story comes to us from Joel Kreitz.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Hi, Guy.

• 41:42Guy Raz?

  Joel is from Cleveland. He's a huge Cleveland sports fan. And a few years ago, he was at an Indians game with his 16-year-old son, Kobe. It was a beautiful summer night of baseball, and Joel was loving it. But Kobe?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  He just wasn't into the action of the game. He didn't really care about the outcome. He wasn't into the standings.

• 42:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, he just said, "This is boring. Let's go."

• 42:06Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And I said something to the effect of, "No, I paid to be here, and now you're going to sit there and like it."

• 42:12Guy Raz?

  OK, many of us have been in a similar situation. This is no fun for Kobe. It's no fun for Joel. So in that moment, Joel suggested a game. He turned to Kobe and he said, "Hey, why don't we try to predict what the next batter's going to do? Strikeout, hit a homer, walk, whatever." And whoever predicts correctly wins.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And he said, "Fine." And within the very next at-bat, we were laughing and high-fiving, and I thought I had just struggled.

• 42:40Guy Raz?

  And so after that, every time Joel went to see baseball, he'd play the game with his other kids as well. And he started to tell his friends about it, especially friends with kids. And he realized that a lot of fans were already doing the same thing.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  People have told me, "Oh, I play this with my grandpa, where we predict the at-bats and we use this and that to keep track of the score." And people in the bullpen who are bored when they're watching a game, they'll do some version of it.

• 43:05Guy Raz?

  So about a year later, he wondered whether he might turn this idea into a smartphone app, an app that you could play at home or in the stadium against other fans who were all watching the live game in real time. But he needed to set up a way of scoring how many points for a predicted strike, or a homerun, or a double play. Well, fortunately, in his day job, Joel is an accountant.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I quickly got out my spreadsheets and started downloading statistics to figure out what should the different predictions for an at-bat be worth based on their statistical likelihood. So there's ground out worth two points, strikeout is three points, single, four points.

• 43:48Guy Raz?

  Anyway, Joel eventually hired a developer to build out a smartphone app. And after some tinkering, he put it out into the world.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  I literally printed off flyers and I stood outside of our local stadium just asking people to play. And that's how I got it off the ground initially.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  So Joel, can I just raise one thing? Because I'm a huge baseball fan and I take my boys to a lot of games. And there's something beautiful and magical about being in a stadium or an arena.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:18Guy Raz?

  And just watching the game and having our devices off. I don't know. Joel, I feel like you've surrendered. You've said, nope, this is the reality and I'm just gonna go with it.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  In some ways, I have. But in the times we live in, I mean, the baseball average age of a viewer nowadays has gone from age 53 to 57 in the past decade. So you got to find a way to reach the kids. And this is what I've come up with.

• 44:45Guy Raz?

  Joel's already licensed the app to a few amateur baseball teams and even a few professional softball teams. He's only made a few thousand dollars so far, but he's hoping to expand the idea to other sports like football and basketball and maybe eventually even to sports bars.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  The focus is to honestly make a new standard for fan engagement across the world because there's nothing to prevent us from offering it in Latin America and Korea and Japan and everywhere.

• 45:14Guy Raz?

  Joel Kreitz lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He founded Micro Fantasy. If you want to find out more about Micro Fantasy, check out our Facebook page. Just search How I Built This on Facebook. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts. Or however you get your podcasts. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can also go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. You can write us. It's H-I-B-T at NPR.org. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour,

• 45:59Guy Raz?

  Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Lawrence Wu. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Hey there, Paula Poundstone here. I hate to interrupt, but maybe you might like to listen to my new show, live from the Poundstone Institute, where I talk to researchers about interesting studies. It's like Hidden Brain, except our brains are really well-hidden. Find it now on the NPR ONE app and wherever you listen to podcasts.