Rolling Stone magazine is shrinking with the times.
After more than four decades of standing out with a larger format than other magazines, it will step back and look like everyone else starting with the Oct. 30 issue, due out this week.
The adoption of a standard format could boost single-copy sales and reduce production costs for advertising inserts such as scent strips and tear-out postcards. Any cost savings, though, will be offset by the inclusion of more pages and the shift to thicker, glossier paper.
Rolling Stone chose Barack Obama for the cover of the Oct. 30 issue. By contrast, the last issue in the oversize format featured a cartoon of Obama’s opponent, John McCain.
“Like the man we are featuring on the cover for the third time in seven months… we embrace the idea of change,” editor Jann S. Wenner wrote in the new issue. “Not change for the sake of change, but change as evolution and growth and renewal, change as the kind of cultural renaissance that gave birth to Rolling Stone more than four decades ago.”
Rolling Stone has changed formats twice before. It first published in 1967 as a tabloid-size newspaper because that was all its budget covered. It began printing on a four-colour press in 1973 and magazine-quality paper in 1981, when it also shrank to its just-abandoned size and adopted the feel of a magazine-newspaper hybrid.
The switch to a standard format comes as readers depend less on the printed page for breaking news said Anthony DeCurtis, a longtime writer for the magazine.
And size may not matter in the Internet era, though Rolling Stone says the website will remain supplemental to print, which has seen circulation stable at about 1.45 million since 2006.
Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, said the size change allows editors to squeeze in more content and better sprinkle longer stories with photos, though he insists the length and types of stories won’t change.
Rolling Stone said it will add enough pages to each issue to offset the loss of space from switching to the smaller size. The 148 pages in the next issue, for instance, accommodate about as much material as 100 pages in the old size.
The smaller format lets the magazine run more full-page photos, however, because each now takes up less surface area. Comic strips and other elements also take less space, even though they are in the same proportion to the rest of the page. That opens the added pages to new content.
Likewise, full-page ads will take up less space—though ad rates won’t drop.
The new paper should make photographs shine more, and the smaller size will make it easier to carry and read. A glued rather than stapled binding should make ad inserts easier to produce.
The new size will also fit better on magazine racks and could help boost single-copy sales, which currently account for only 8% of the magazine’s circulation.
