How I Built This with Guy Raz - Rolling Stone: Jann Wenner

Episode Date: July 10, 2017

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.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb.

It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. We made a big mistake in our editorial processes. I was sick about it. I mean, you know, 50 years of great journalism and reputation for integrity and for quality and stuff.

and then there was a couple of really bad judgment calls that were made on a very sensitive story, and it blew up on our face. That was probably the biggest one. That was. Always there's this one thing that happens. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Jan Wiener 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. 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 computer. in the 1980s, so he built Compact.

And for Jan Wener, 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 Francisco and the Bay Area were becoming the center of youth culture in America. But just being there wasn't enough. What Yon Winter 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. San Francisco was a small, you know, a small town then,

not all like I'd say. And a little off the beat of mainstream America, yet at the same time was that beautiful picturesque town, which was very tolerant of social behavior that was a little off the center and the arts community, which was a little off the center. So preceding the rock and roll scene, and the hippies in San Francisco,

there were the beadnicks. It was the Air Valen-Ginsberg and Carrowack, and Ferland Getty, and they all found a home in San Francisco, you know, as did people like Lenny Bruce. So it had a thriving beatnik alternative lifestyle community, and so therefore was extremely tolerant of the rock and roll groups who were springing up, who were even weirder than the beatnecks, and had a coffee house scene. And that was consistent with San Francisco's long history of being tolerant of different

kinds of political movements and artistic movements. It means interesting because, of course, there were pretty strong student movements at Columbia and in Boston. But, I mean, San Francisco, Berkeley, that was the center of student activism in America, arguably in the world at that time. 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 at the very early days of civil rights movement. So a lot of students were going off on March. down south and participating those kinds of things. So I think political activism among students really was generated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Was it exciting, an exciting time? Oh, yeah.

I mean, because, you know, they're full of commitment and passion and a sense of possibility and the post-war baby boom just starting to come of age, starting to become college students and sensing that was their turn on stage and it was their right or responsibility to try and make America stand up for and behave in such a way as that we were taught in school, America's ideals were about, liberty, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Tell me how you met Ralph Gleason, because he would, of course, a figure very prominently in the founding story here. But tell me who was he and how did you meet him?

Well, Ralph Gleeson 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 a 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. Do you remember what show? It was called a tribute to Dr. Strange. And you just went up to him and said, hey, I'm Yon Winter. Yes, I did. And then he said, I know who you are. I've been reading your column on the day of California. Wow.

Were you blown away that this famous jazz critic was? I sure was. Because I'm part in my column after him. So he chatted and so 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. 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.

How much older was he than you? I was probably 20 at the time, and he was 40, so he was an adult to me. He was a grown-up. 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? Well, he kind of looked after my career. I went after, in the summer of 65, I was in life.

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 not come back? And he got me that job. And Ramparts Magazine itself was kind of very, was a left-wing kind of investigative journalism

magazine. I was in charge of that tender age of the arts and entertainment. made cover twitch since I was in charge leaned heavily towards rock and roll and hippie culture. So much of the stuff that would end up in Rolling Stone. And after that job ran out about nine months later, I was kind of a loss of what to do. I was 20 years old. I think at the time or 21. And, you know, no career training, no immediate job prospects.

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

And, well, it was a high bar to get over, but a low bar. I mean, it was going to be a newspaper on newsprint. So it wasn't going to be any kind of full-scale magazine launch or anything like that. And was going to be focused on rock and roll? On rock and roll. Was there anything like that in 1967? Nothing like that. So help me understand this, Jan.

This guy, Ralph Gleeson, 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? 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 of fans' magazine about that, about jazz. So I think he probably saw it in me maybe a younger version of himself. He saw its possibilities, and he saw that I had some kind of level of talent.

an ambition that might be able to bring something off. He even gave me money for it. What was the ambition? Did you guys sit there and say, we are going to make the biggest magazine in America? No. I mean, I don't even know if we knew what the biggest magazine in America was. Yeah. But that wasn't part of the ambition.

The ambition was to do something that was new and fresh about the music. And Ronald 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, these were people who started to articulate a kind of rebellious stance towards society. They were concerned about, you know, like the element was writing a lot about alienation. And the Beatles were writing a lot about kind of social morals 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.

So Ralph says, okay, let's. let's do this. He has a little bit of cash to put in? He had some cash to put in and I got some $2,000 of my mother and for my mother-in-law to be and some money from a college friend of mine and also for my stepmother. And that assembled together was $7,500 and that was what we started with. 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. Well, yeah, it was all complicated, not too expensive, but we need to find offices. So we went to the printer that we had used at Sunday Ramparts agreed to give us offices upstairs in our planning 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 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. And how did you come up with a name?

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

But, I mean, you were creating a business. Did you, how did you even know where to start? 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. Yeah. You know, so, oh, my God. 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? About three months, two months. That's fast. Wow. We were fast on our fever.

And so what was the, tell me about the first issue. What was in it? John Lennon was on a cover, a photo of him. as private gripweed and a movie How I Won the War. Right. And that came back, not that we sent out

somebody to take a picture of John Lennon, but just whatever free publicity photographs were flying around the time. We were looking for something, and there was a package of pictures for that movie was just coming out. We just took that one of John and dressed up as a soldier

and turned it to be brilliant. And he went looking back at it. The choice of John Lennon for cover of our first issue was, you know, more than for two of us. And what was inside? Were there reviews of shows in San Francisco? There's a couple of reviews of shows in San Francisco.

So the big thing was we did a investigation to what had happened to the money that had been earned at the Monterey Pop Festival. Had it been given the charity or not. So we looked into that in a long report and kind of established right then there that we were going to do very traditional journalism. Okay. So tell me about just getting the articles in and the deadlines. I mean, were your writers going out and making things? deadlines and were you working around the clock to get this thing out? Was it a weekly? Was it a monthly? It was every other week, a fortnight week. Well, we had very few writers, and it's very hard to push them

too hard if they're all volunteered. If you're not paying anybody, you know, you're sort of asking them to do things. But everybody's like 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. I mean, I'm assuming that you, despite the fact that you were in the sort of the center of the sex, drugs and rock and roll 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. 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 there's, you know, 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, you know, and all the little things that go into it. I mean, I was the mailroom as well as the editor. And how did you fund it? Did you have to also put, of course, ads, I'm assuming, right? Well, we tried to sell ads, and we 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. So how much runway did you have with that $7,500? 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 would be checks,

from that and check some advertisers, and then people might start subscribing, paying $5 a year or something like that. So, you know, there was enough to keep it going, and then 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 or 40,000 copies in issue. People were responding to it. The record companies were liking it. We were getting letters and correspondence and recognition from various artists. In the first year, we published a long interview with Pete Townsend, interviews with McChaggar. So it was gathering momentum.

People liked what they saw. Did you have that advantage because you were the only magazine like this out there? Well, yes. Nobody else is 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, the baby boom is 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 or they can kind of communicate with each other and see what other people like them around the world we're doing.

And so this is the way young people communicated. There was nothing else. So do you remember when the magazine started to get attention? Was it year two, three? Like, when did it start to become something people will just talk about? Well, the first time we got a lot of attention was on the first year anniversary. We printed the cover, the band Two Versions cover of the album that John Yoko, John Lennon, Yoko did together.

the 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 beetle perils SF. But we sold out the printing, we printed more, and it just kind of got more and more people talking. And then I think in here two, we did a big specialist young groupie. And that got us more attention with a photo portfolio and big report about girls who follow bands around

and all the stuff 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 as 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. 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 on the road. Tell me how you came across Hunter Thompson because I think it's fair to say he was your first really big

breakthrough writer. 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 started Rolling Stone asking him to write something for us. And he wrote back saying, geez, he'd been 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 didn't you write about that? And which he did, and which we published a couple months later, it was called the Battle of Aspen or Freak Power in Iraqis. And, of course, the idea that he's running for sheriff of Aspen caught enormous amount of attention, you know, immediate places around the world.

And all of a sudden he was inundated with reporters and film crews from New York, from London, and so forth like that. And so that was, you know, once again, it started just our reputation growing more and more. 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 is...

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 L.A. and a Chicano movement there. 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.

It's the first time that 18 years are 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 to do American politics? It makes sort of sense. 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. 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. Well, nothing says that you can't take acid and cover an event, maybe even better than without acid. But I mean, that wasn't traditional journalism. It was a radical way of... 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 have basically turned off the political process,

you have to engage them again and make it kind of colorful and interesting. And McGovern was an interesting personality. And Nixon at that time was 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.

That's everybody well acknowledged. What was he like to work with? I mean, was he reliable? Was he? Reliable is not one of the words. Erratic. I mean. 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 into the very last man. a deadline and almost drive you crazy and bringing you right to the edge. In the end, he always delivered. You could always count on him to do so. So I had a great time. I mean, it took a lot of my time. It was draining and 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 that really finally put Rolling Stone on the map in a big way. 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 with record companies. And we were on our way. So that was it? I mean, there were no growing pains?

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 and a printer's place to a big, you know, expensive, new, expansive offices. Then all the overhead that entails. And we were spending money without really thinking about it. And so, 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 $300,000, $400,000. And once we got through that, we started, you know, professional analyzing 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 the money. And over the years, that just got more and more professionalized. But 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. Why did you, yeah, why did you do that? Why did you leave San Francisco in 70s? 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. 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. 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? Well, yeah. I mean, there was that heyday when we started,

which had not only this thriving rock or mole culture and his thriving youth culture, but a thriving political culture and all the left stuff and the black pants and all sorts of things were happening in prison in San Francisco. But sort of by the time we moved, 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 Maylor was around and Andy Warhol was around. And then San Francisco wasn't so much of cultural backwater. It was just, Provincial, you know, it was out on the coast. Huh. And it was off of the mainstream. It wasn't putting out this big, unique culture thing and music anymore.

You know, Jan, I'm trying to get my head into, I'm trying to sort of get myself 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. Well, I mean, it wasn't too difficult. I mean, really, first of up, I never quite believed in a counterculture or called 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 everybody wanted to get paid, you know, If you had families, you want 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, you're principles of this, but you're a hippie capitalist. And it's kind of a contradiction.

How can you stand for both? But, I mean, it's stuff that wasn't nothing I really paid attention to. And at that point, did you start to really get interested in the business side of things? Are you looking at PNLs? Were you looking at the bottom line? Were you doing that too? Well, again, I wasn't myself doing it as I was always had something there as CEO or CFO who had the day-to-day responsibility for all that. And that person would report to me and I look at it and have oversight over it and try to understand it and try to give directions and strategic advice.

But I didn't have control the day-to-day operations on the business side. I control the editor. But when you're involved in something like 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 kind of brings you along. The true test of how tough a businessman you are, how shrewd is when things are not going so well. Was there a time after your move to New York where things were not going well? with a magazine?

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. Did you sell it for a profit? I sold it for about what I put into it. But I couldn't afford to be sustaining both magazines at once.

Did that, did you feel pressure to, I mean, I mean, a magazine today, of course, is not a, 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 know. By the time we moved to New York, it was fully up and operating. I mean, Rolling Stone was getting to a circulation of one million copies. When you've got a circulation of one million, you're, you were a solid, stable business with a lot of money coming in. Did you ever have to find additional outside investment funding at any point? After that, no. No, you were totally self-sufficient.

Yeah. So tell me about your, I mean, how you started to grow because Rolling Stone was this thing and this your baby and outside you would bought and sold. And then you moved on and started to buy other publications, right? No. We started out 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. 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? I mean, 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 missed the punk movement. Was there any truth to that? 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 hate us for covering punk. But we're always get critics. That's good to have, you know. Our philosophy is always, we're going to stay with the news or what's of interested 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. 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 story.

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 there's digital delivery of food or digital delivery of news or how to hook. up or so if one wanted to do a magazine day, 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. Yeah. But I mean, content is, there's so much free content today compared to when, you know, the heyday of Rolling Stone. Right. Right.

It's a different beast now. I mean, your content that people have to pay money for, they may not get as high quality content for free, but there's a lot. lot available, right? So it's a tougher... 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 find magazines that vial. But having said that, we still have a huge readership, you know, of a million

and four right now. Yeah. I want to just read a list of some names of Rolling Stone alum. Hunter Thompson, of course, Joe Klein, Cameron Crowe, Joe Estrahaus, P. Joe O'Rourke, Annie Leibovitz, Lester Bangs, Matt Taibi, William Greider, Kurt Loder, Michael Hastings. Incredible list of people. What's the story? How do you find people? Do they come to you?

Are you just good at identifying good people? Are you lucky? How did you get these writers? Well, it's a combination of 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've seen an interview with somebody once said the proof of how good an idea Rolling Stone was is that it survived Yon's management of it. Because you were a crappy manager of it. 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.

Yeah. You know, I just had ambition and energy and a good idea and a great idea. You know, Yon, of all those names I just read, only one of them, of course, is a woman, Annie Leibovice, 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 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? 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 Nor Ephron. and Alan Willis at that time, later on, Gloria Emerson. We had a great group of women editors at the center of the law. Patty Smith. You published Betty Smith? 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. I've read that at a certain point you kind of had a falling out with Hunter Thompson. Can you tell me what happened? What do you remember about that? 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, if Nixon was not available to somebody else, then it was me. And I just took it with good humor. But we were very fast friends for years. 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 his 70s, right? 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. Was it just because of his lifestyle? I think it was because of his lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. That's a polite way of putting it. Did you keep in touch with them until he died? We were always in touch, you know, frequently and frequently, you know, we always knew each other doing. We talk often.

I was always trying to get in 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 in Elko and one about the Pulitzer trial, which were great, pieces of writing. You know, Jan, we were just talking about your management. 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 absolutely just despise you, right? I mean, it's normal, right? 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, I sure there's criticism, but I think my reputation is more for being fair and being equitable and reasonable people. Being a tough and demanding boss, absolutely. but I don't think anybody would say that as unfair, you know, or mean or cruel. What I've learned about managing people is that you want them to be happy 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 don't shrink too much when a decision has to be made. It has to be made. I'm one for second chances. I've always been people's second chances. I want to ask you about a pretty big crisis that you guys had around the UVA story, the story that you published a few years ago about a rape on campus at the University of Virginia, you know, 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, the magazine at the time? That was difficult. But not an existential crisis. 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 amical settlement. All I can say is we made a big mistake in our editorial processes. Yeah. And obviously, I understand that there's details you can 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? I was sick about it. I mean, you know, 50 years of great journalism and a reputation for integrity and for quality and all and stuff. And then there was a couple of really bad judgment calls that were made on a very sensitive story. And it blew up on our face. But the general report on rape on campus was quite accurate. The illustrative main story, the rape victim, that was made up by that rape victim.

And we printed that without adequately checking it. But as you know, as a journalist, it's enough, right? The minute you get something wrong, the rest of it doesn't matter. Soon or later, you're going to get something like that, you know, whether the New York Times of the Washington Post. 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.

That was. Always there's just one thing that happens. Do you still own, you own 100%? of your company, right? My self and my family own 100% of the company. Is its value publicly a public thing? No. You keep that private. Yeah. But upward of, let's say, winter media, upward of a quarter million dollars? Whatever you want to say. I mean, would you ever sell it? Um, you know, who knows? I mean, in the heyday, rolling stones is 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 of you get. 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. Yeah. 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. You are 71. That's correct. You started this magazine 50 years ago. That's right. Are you still going every day? 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. So when do you stop being involved with Rolling Stone ever? 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 and a story like that.

And as long as I can make those kind of contributions and come 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. I'm coming with ideas. Everybody's looking at me going, what is this old man thinking? Then I think I'm being back off. 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. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to be able to be. going to hear from you about the things that you're building. 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. Hi, Guy. 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? He just wasn't into the action of the game. He didn't really care about the outcome. You know, it wasn't into the standings. Wow. Yeah, he just said,

this is boring. Let's go. And I said something to the effect of, no, I've paid to be here, tonight you're going to sit there and like it. Okay, 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 is going to do? strike out, hit a home or walk, whatever. And whoever predicts correctly wins. And he said, fine. And within the very next at-bat, we were laughing and high-fiving, and I thought I had just struggled. 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. People have told me, oh, I play this with my grandpa, where we predict the at-bats and we use, you know, 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. 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 home run or a double play. Well, fortunately, in his day job, Joel is an accountant. I quickly got out my spreadsheets and started downloading statistics to figure out what should the different predictions for netbat be worth based on their statistical likelihood.

So there's ground out worth two points. Strikeout is three points. Single, four points. Anyway, Joel eventually hired a developer to build out a smartphone app. And after some tinkering, he put it out into the world. 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. 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.

Right. And just watching the game and having our devices off. I don't know. I just, Joel, I feel like you've surrendered. You've said, nope, this is the reality, and I'm just going to go with it. 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 decades. So you've got to find the way to reach the kids, and this is what I've come up with. 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 be. to expand the idea to other sports like football and basketball and maybe eventually even to sports bars. 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. 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, 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 how I built this.npr.org. You can write us. It's Hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show is produced this week by Rumpteen Ira Bluey, who also compose the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, 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. 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.