“The Classic Rock Magazine Is Switching to a Smaller, Rack-Friendly Size”
It looks like Rolling Stone is caving, switching from a newspaper-like layout to a smaller, glossy magazine.
The smaller size is the last step in appealing to a wider audience. I thought their move to more and more non-musicians on the cover was somewhat recent, but their own gallery of covers from 2006 proves me wrong. It is categorized into sectionss like Early Years ‘67-‘69 (all musicians), Comedians, Hollywood Women, and Hollywood Men. Newer categories could be Singing Kids of the Disney Channel and Reality TV stars.
Their stated intentions are to make the long articles less daunting with smaller pages and by breaking them up with more pictures. As an added bonus, advertisers will be attracted to the new shiny paper that will make their ads pretty. They aren’t really saving paper with the small format, either. They will be adding pages to compensate for the smaller size. I’ll be interested to see if the number of ads also increases to compensate for the glossy paper.
(link via ian fitzgerald)
