Why Couldn’t Rolling Stone Get It Up?

Rolling Stone did an amazing job securing unprecedented access to General McChrystal, getting a major story, fact-checking it, and handing it off to the press corps, maximizing their PR efforts. However, they did slip up on one crucial aspect of the article: posting it online. For hours, every media outlet was reporting on the story and neither a quote nor a mention of it could be found anywhere on the magazine’s website, an oversight they’ve since corrected. In their defense, they did manage to put up this issue’s Lady Gaga gun-tit cover story in a timely manner.

General McChrystal’s Rolling Stone Profile Is Eyjafjallajokull’s Fault

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, was told to get his ass back to Washington, pronto, after talking a bunch of shit about the president and senior White House officials in a Rolling Stone profile by Michael Hastings. According to MSNBC, the reporter was supposed to only get two days with the general in Paris, but due to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland, ended up spending a month with him and top aides, many of whom were also loose-lipped in their criticism of Obama and his inner circle.

John Mayer Thinks Tiger Woods Should’ve Been Jerking Off More

The new issue of Rolling Stone features a cover piece on John Mayer who, when not telling the magazine about how he’s on an epic search for the “Joshua Tree of vaginas” to make his life complete, and complaining about how “blowing me off is the new sucking me off,” dispensed advice to Tiger Woods: “If Tiger Woods only knew when to jerk off. It has a true market value, like gold bullion. I am the new generation of masturbator. I’ve seen it all. Before I make coffee, I’ve seen more butt holes than a proctologist does in a week… I have masturbated myself out of serious problems in my life. The phone doesn’t pick up because I’m masturbating.” |Daily Beast|

Sean Lennon Pretends He’s Yoko Ono

For the Fall issue of Purple magazine, Sean Lennon appears in a recreation of his parents’ famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover, their last photo together by financially troubled photographer Annie Leibovitz. The new snap by Terry Richardson features Sean in his mother’s place while nude model Kemp Muhl fills in for his dead father. See the semi-NSFW homage below. Read more »

‘Rolling Stone’ Slimming Down, Obama To Debut New Size

Rolling Stone is abandoning its signature oversized format with a more standard one and now the magazine will “look like everyone else” according to the Associated Press. This will be third change in size for the publication since it was first launched in 1967. Barack Obama will appear on the cover of the newly changed magazine’s October 30th issue, while poor John McCain’s cartoon image was the last to grace the more traditional, costlier format. Media bias! The magazine is hoping that it can get better placement on newsstands since it will no longer be relegated to the floor and is betting that the new size will be more accommodating for annoying ad units like “scent strips and tear-out postcards.” To offset the smaller size, the magazine will also be padded with more pages and stories can now get what they desperately need to increase relevancy for today’s readers: more photos! |AP|