Britney story in Rolling Stone

But very effective. I just read the excerpt and will be stopping by B&N on my way home so I can buy RS and read the whole thing. Well, maybe I won't buy it -- but I'll certainly take it into the coffee shop and read it. So maybe that ploy isn't that effective.

 

It is absolutely fantastic writing for a male, 18-34 audience. For the upscale male, 34-60, go read Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Someone who loves writing will appreciate the quality in both , understanding that one is written by a pop culture savant, and one was written by perhaps the greatest storyteller of all time.

I love Klosterman's Spears piece — just like I love Joel Stein's Leo DiCaprio piece in Time, just like I love Neil Strauss' Spears' piece in Rolling Stone.

 

It was much better than Taibbi's piece.
His act is getting very old.

 

Taibbi was definitely on fire. I loved how he called Reid the biggest vagina of all time.

As for Vanesssa, she had me at Meat Pole.

 

I picked up this issue because of this thread and was not disappointed in the Spears piece. Some very interesting cultural analysis and reporting.

However, I though the Heath Ledger obit was probably the best written thing in the magazine.

And you can read the whole thing on-line too.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/18355273/heath_ledger_1979__2008

 

I know it wasn't Grigoriadis' best piece, but the one I really enjoyed was about stoners at UC Santa Cruz a few years back. I can't seem to find a link to it.

 

That really is a terrific piece of writing. Insightful, smart, beautiful, and impossible not to finish once you've started it. Man, I'm sitting here thinking about it -- Lipsky hit every note precisely. It's the sort of story that reads like it was written quickly, in a creative rush, but I think he probably spent as much time as he could on it. That thing is craft.

 

I was trying to pick out a part of it that I liked (to quote in my post), and I realized, I just loved the whole damn thing. I feel exactly like you did, Jonesy, that it feels like it was written in a creative rush, but that all the pieces seem to fit together to form the picture. It wasn't cheap, maudlin or overdone, just beautiful and sad.

If Rolling Stone had stories this good this often, I'd resubscribe.

 

I think the writing is great. I could be wrong, but it looks like all the quotes were extracted from other stories. I get the image of someone wearing a visor, pounding a typewriter. Get me rewrite. Very good rewrite, indeed, but rewrite nonetheless. I think Jones' image of someone writing it quickly might be right. I can see someone gathering, organizing, pounding it out and going back to remove anything not essential, in a day or two.

 

As a longtime RS subscriber who has little interest in the Britney circus, I thought that story very entertaining and it covered all the bases.

The Clive Davis story is the kind of thing RS used to do really well and they'll still pull one of those great music-related stories out once in a while.

And I like Matt Taibbi. He's not P.J. O'Rourke but his stuff is always worth reading in my view.

 

Something that always makes me think...

As newspaper writers, we are always told to write small paragraphs. Whenever I read SI, Rolling Stone or any other magazine publication, the paragraphs are much longer sometimes huge. Is it just because people have more time to read magazines or what gives?

 

It's mostly a visual thing with newspapers. Long paragraphs look awful in thin columns. And short paragraphs look awful in wide-column magazine format.