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    Covering the Rise of Tracy Chapman

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    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicTracy Chapman’s ascent to the pop stratosphere in 1988 was not in any way guaranteed. She was making folk music in a time of stadium rock and hip-hop. She was orienting her songs around social concerns. And yet, after a few fortuitous turns in the summer of that year, Chapman’s “Fast Car” became a global anthem. And its success landed her on the cover of Rolling Stone.For a young Black woman on her first album, it was a startling achievement. The magazine was relatively cloistered in its coverage, but Chapman proved a force to reckon with. The story, written by Steve Pond, is a crucial document — but it is also prophetic, capturing how Chapman was skeptical of the spotlight, and even of the reasons people had embraced her so assiduously.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Chapman’s rapid rise to pop royalty, how her music figured into the broader musical conversation of the late 1980s, and the ways in which she’s changed little over the decades.Guest:Steve Pond, a longtime music journalist for Rolling Stone and The Los Angeles Times who is now the awards editor of The WrapConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Jann Wenner Removed From Rock Hall Board After Times Interview

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      The Rolling Stone co-founder’s exit comes a day after The New York Times published an interview in which he made widely criticized comments.Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.But the dismissal of Mr. Wenner comes after an interview with The Times, published Friday and timed to the publication of his new book, called “The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”Mr. Wenner’s comments drew an immediate reaction, with his quotes mocked on social media and past criticisms unearthed of Rolling Stone’s coverage of female artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagan, who in 2017 wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner, “Sticky Fingers,” cited a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in 1970 called the magazine “viciously anti-woman.”Mr. Wenner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.Mr. Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 with the music critic Ralph J. Gleason and made it the pre-eminent music magazine of its time, with deep coverage of rock music as well as politics and current events. Much of it was written by stars of the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Gleason died in 1975.Mr. Wenner sold the magazine over a series of transactions completed in 2020, and he officially left it in 2019. Last year, he published a memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.”Mr. Wenner was also part of a group of music and media executives that founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983, and inducted its first class in 1986; its affiliated museum, in Cleveland, opened in 1995. Mr. Wenner himself was inducted in 2004 as a nonperformer.The Rock Hall has been criticized for the relative few women and minority artists who have been inducted over the years. According to one scholar, by 2019 just 7.7 percent of the individuals in the hall were women. But some critics have applauded recent changes, and the newest class of inductees includes Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott, along with George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners. More

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      Man Is Sentenced to 21 Years in Shooting of Lady Gaga’s Dog Walker

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      Two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen during the attack in Hollywood last year, during which her dog walker was shot in the chest, the police said.A man who shot Lady Gaga’s dog walker during a violent robbery last year during which two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen was sentenced on Monday to 21 years in prison, prosecutors said.The man, James Howard Jackson, reached a deal with prosecutors under which he pleaded no contest to one count of attempted murder and admitted to inflicting great bodily injury and to “a prior strike,” according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.Mr. Jackson, 20, was immediately sentenced to 21 years in state prison, the district attorney’s office said. “The plea agreement holds Mr. Jackson accountable for perpetrating a coldhearted, violent act and provides justice for our victim,” the office said in a statement.Ryan Fischer, the dog walker who was shot in the chest during the attack on Feb. 24, 2021, in Hollywood, spoke directly to Mr. Jackson in court shortly before Mr. Jackson entered his plea, Rolling Stone reported.“You shot me and left me to die, and both of our lives have changed forever,” Mr. Fischer said, according to Rolling Stone. He added that the shooting led to “lung collapse after lung collapse,” as well as the loss of his career and friendships.Still, Mr. Fischer told Mr. Jackson, according to Rolling Stone: “I do forgive you. With the attack, you completely altered my life. I know I can’t completely move on from the night you shot me until I said those words to you.”It was not immediately clear who Mr. Jackson’s lawyer was.Mr. Jackson was accused of participating in the robbery along with two others, Jaylin White and Lafayette Whaley, who were also charged in the case last year.The area where Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot and two of her French bulldogs were stolen in Los Angeles last February.Chris Pizzello/Associated PressThe police had said that the robbers, who grabbed the dogs and fled in a car after the shooting, were not targeting the French bulldogs because they belonged to Lady Gaga.Evidence instead suggested that the men knew that the breed was valuable, according to the police. Lady Gaga had offered a $500,000 reward for the safe return of the dogs, which are named Koji and Gustav.Mr. Fischer, who was critically wounded in the shooting, had recalled lying in a pool of blood and holding one of Lady Gaga’s dogs that had not been stolen in the attack.In August, Jaylin White and Mr. Whaley each pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree robbery, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. White was sentenced to four years in state prison, and Mr. Whaley was sentenced to six years in state prison, the office said.The police said last year that two others — Harold White and Jennifer McBride — had been charged with being accessories after the shooting. Ms. McBride reported that she had found the dogs and had responded to a reward email to return them, the police said.Ms. McBride ultimately took the dogs to a Los Angeles police station, the police said. The police said that they later discovered that Ms. McBride had a relationship with one of the men who had been arrested.According to the district attorney’s office, Harold White pleaded no contest on Monday to one count of being a former convict in possession of a gun. He is scheduled to be sentenced next year, the office said. Ms. McBride’s case is continuing, the office said. More

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      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      You Don’t Know Much About Jay Penske. And He’s Fine With That.

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      For the media executive Jay Penske, awards season is money season. It’s the time of year when Disney and Netflix, along with the other studios and streamers, demonstrate their love for the talent by spending millions on For Your Consideration ads in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, as well as the niche outlets Gold Derby, IndieWire and TVLine. All of those publications, which cover things of special interest to Oscar and Emmy voters, are part of Penske Media Corporation.Mr. Penske, a 43-year-old son of a billionaire, has expanded his company greatly in the last few years, pulling off a series of buy-low acquisitions that have turned him into a behind-the-scenes power broker. In addition to the Hollywood trades, he owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe and Women’s Wear Daily, and he has a controlling stake in the annual South by Southwest festival.“Jay Penske has become the Rupert Murdoch of entertainment publications,” said Stephen Galloway, a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter who is now the dean of the Chapman University film school.The flurry of deals, announced in a steady drumbeat of news releases, was not all that sexy, given Mr. Penske’s focus on old-school publications at a time when Substack and TikTok were hot topics in media circles.But the moves have made him someone to be reckoned with, a mogul who can shape perceptions of Hollywood and its players. And his company has become a prime landing spot for the tens of millions spent annually on Oscars and Emmys advertising, a market that has heated up in recent years as streaming platforms spare no expense in their quests for prestige and attention.Mr. Penske made himself into a publisher after growing up the youngest son of the automotive industry titan Roger Penske, a onetime professional racecar driver, known as the Captain, who started his business, Penske Corporation, once his racing days were done. The father’s success made the Penske name all but inescapable. On any street you may see one of the more than 360,000 trucks and vans belonging to his transportation fleet, with the family name in bold black lettering on the side.Up until a decade ago, Jay Penske was one of many scions looking to move upward in Los Angeles. From the start, he was driven by a desire to make the family name known for something other than his father’s accomplishments, said the media entrepreneur Rafat Ali, who met Mr. Penske more than a dozen years ago. “I think he has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself,” he said. “He was hustling back then not to be known as Penske — to prove himself not to the world, but to his family.”Mr. Penske, who declined to be interviewed for this article, entered publishing in earnest in 2009, when he bought Deadline Hollywood Daily, a take-no-prisoners entertainment news site started by the journalist Nikki Finke. A few years later, it became apparent that his ambitions went beyond watching over a scrappy digital outlet, when he set his sights on Variety, the age-old show business publication that was challenged by the transition to online media.The veteran Hollywood executive Sandy Climan put him in touch with Daniel S. Loeb, a hedge fund investor, and the two hit it off over breakfast at the Montage Beverly Hills. Months later Mr. Penske called Mr. Loeb to say he was closing in on a Variety deal — but his financing had collapsed.A 2015 cover of Variety, the trade publication acquired by Penske Media in 2012.via VarietyThe Hollywood Reporter, a Variety competitor, came aboard in 2020.Victoria Will (cover image), via Hollywood Reporter“He’s super-close to his dad,” Mr. Loeb said. “His dad could have written that check in a heartbeat. But I think Jay would rather have let the deal go off the rails before going to his dad for anything other than emotional support.”Mr. Loeb’s fund provided the $26 million in debt and equity Mr. Penske needed to clinch the sale. (That investment made Mr. Loeb a part owner of Variety; Mr. Penske has since bought back his stake, Mr. Loeb and a Penske Media spokeswoman said.)After acquiring Variety, he continued his spree, picking up faded properties at bargain-bin prices. In 2014 he bought Fairchild Fashion Media, the owner of Women’s Wear Daily, from Condé Nast. In 2017 he bought Jann Wenner’s 51 percent stake in Rolling Stone; two years later he acquired the remaining 49 percent, after a cash infusion from a Saudi company. In 2020 Mr. Penske bought 80 percent of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Vibe.Last year he made his move on South by Southwest, becoming a majority shareholder in the annual tech, film and music festival, which had run into money troubles because of the pandemic. (It made its return this month, after having been shut down the last two years.) Along the way Mr. Penske added ARTnews, Art in America, Dirt, Beauty Inc. and Spy.“Jay grew up with great wealth, but in L.A. there are rooms that are not open to just any rich guy,” said Matthew Belloni, who leads entertainment industry coverage for a new publication, Puck, and who was the top editor of The Hollywood Reporter before Mr. Penske took over. “Owning all of these publications makes him a must-know.”In an industry that rewards attention seekers, he stands apart because of his penchant for privacy. He avoids red carpet events, almost never gives interviews and has no social media footprint. “He prefers to let the brands speak for themselves,” a Penske Media spokeswoman said.Illustration by Tom Hodgkinson; Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto, via Getty Images‘Dragon, Dragon’Mr. Penske lives in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles with his wife, Elaine Irwin, 52, a former Victoria’s Secret and Calvin Klein model who was previously married to the rock star John Mellencamp, and their daughter. He keeps an apartment in New York and recently bought Hog Cay, a private island in the Bahamas.He grew up in New York City, Monmouth County, N.J., and Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where Penske Corporation has its headquarters. Family vacations took place at Deer Valley in Utah, a ski resort that was partly owned by his father from 1987 to 2017. “They were a country club family,” said Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, who lived for a time near the Penskes and knew the young Jay.One of five siblings in a boisterous, competitive family, he distinguished himself in hockey and lacrosse at the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey, and Orchard Lake St. Mary’s, a Catholic prep school in Michigan. He was an all-state hockey player, and in 1997 he was named an All-American lacrosse player. A photo of him still hangs in a St. Mary’s athletic facility, showing him mid-stride on the lacrosse field in his No. 7 jersey, which the school retired.His father is a grand figure, beloved in the racing world. He started Penske Corporation in 1969 after racking up 55 victories behind the wheel. One of his company’s divisions owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the home of the Indy 500. Another subsidiary runs Team Penske, the organization whose drivers have won more than 600 races. In 2019, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jay Penske and Ms. Irwin were among the guests in the Oval Office who looked on as former President Donald J. Trump placed the medal around the patriarch’s neck.Jay showed signs that he would go his own way not long after his 2001 graduation from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Los Angeles and threw himself into businesses that had nothing to do with the nuts, bolts and engine noise of the family trade. An early venture was Firefly Mobile, a company that offered phones designed for children, with large buttons. He also bought promising URLs, including Mail.com, which he built into an email portal business and eventually sold at a profit.The writer A. Scott Berg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Charles Lindbergh and a National Book Award for his study of the editor Maxwell Perkins, was a friend and mentor to Mr. Penske when he was new to Los Angeles. The two bonded over their shared love of books, Mr. Berg said in an interview, adding that he was struck by the younger man’s apparent distaste for Hollywood and the media.“When I met Jay Penske, he viewed two industries with contempt: show business and magazines,” Mr. Berg said. “For whatever reason, he seems to have changed his mind. Maybe he recognized their commercial value, or maybe he came to appreciate their content. One thing I knew from the night I met him in the summer of 2002 was that he was a serious bibliophile.”Jay Penske and his wife, Elaine Irwin, at a Ralph Lauren event in New York in 2018.Wonwoo Lee/ZUMA, via Alamy Mr. Penske gave full expression to his passion when he opened a bookshop in the Beverly Glen neighborhood of Los Angeles. He named it Dragon Books, after a collection of tales he had loved as a child, “Dragon, Dragon,” by John Gardner. The store, with its 18th-century French mantel, wood paneling and Doric columns, became a favorite of antiquarian book lovers. Two hundred people, including his parents, attended the opening in 2006, and Mr. Berg did a brief write-up for Vanity Fair.“While a serial prep-school expellee, he became a serious reader of 19th-century novels,” he wrote of Mr. Penske. “Soon he began collecting, starting with works by Kierkegaard and Mencken. When moving to Los Angeles in 2002, he discovered he had 28,000 volumes, half of which he’s now selling to sustain his passion for new acquisitions. He shelved each book himself, and he often mans the cash register.”He didn’t hold himself entirely aloof from his father’s world. In 2007, with the investor Steve Luczo, he started an IndyCar team, Luczo Dragon Racing. Now fully owned and operated by Mr. Penske and called Dragon Racing, it has competed in the Formula E racing series, for electric cars, for nearly a decade.In 2009, he dove into publishing with the purchase of Deadline. Built on Ms. Finke’s lively voice, it was a gleefully rude digital upstart that made Variety and The Hollywood Reporter seem like house organs for the movie studios and talent agencies. Mr. Penske and Ms. Finke added some reporting muscle when they lured Nellie Andreeva away from The Hollywood Reporter and Mike Fleming from Variety. Deadline’s minuscule staff regularly scooped the competition.With Mr. Penske’s entree into the media business came media attention. The gossip site Gawker took notice of him — at age 30 he was seen at parties in the company of the Benihana heiress Devon Aoki — and labeled him “the hard-partying Si Newhouse Wannabe of Bel Air,” a reference to the longtime Condé Nast chairman.Ms. Finke left Deadline after Mr. Penske’s purchase of Variety amid reports that she preferred that he remain focused on Deadline, rather than attempt to revive a competitor. She started a new blog and used it to refer to him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” After mediation with Mr. Penske, she shut down the site; since then, she has not reported on the entertainment industry. (Ms. Finke declined to comment.)Her onetime colleague Mr. Fleming had nothing but praise for the publisher. In an interview, he noted that Mr. Penske flew to New York to attend the wake for his father, who died in 2012 from injuries sustained during Hurricane Sandy. “That told me everything I needed to know,” said Mr. Fleming, who is now Deadline’s co-editor-in-chief with Ms. Andreeva.The visit took place during an eventful time for Mr. Penske. The year 2012 was also when he got arrested in Nantucket. According to a Nantucket Police Department report, Mr. Penske and his brother Mark were urinating in a parking lot outside the Nantucket Yacht Club late at night when a woman approached. “Jay turned and continued to urinate on her boots,” the report said. After the woman alerted the police, the brothers apparently tried “to flee.”An officer intercepted Jay, and his brother was found on the back staircase of an apartment building, according to the report. The Penskes were locked in a police station cell, only to be released soon afterward. Coverage of the incident was widespread, with reports in Auto Week, The Daily Mail, ESPN and Politico, among other publications.Mr. Penske has not spoken publicly of that night and has kept his silence when faced with public criticism in other instances. One came after his 2017 purchase of a Black church in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles for $6.3 million. Mr. Penske’s plan to convert it into a home for his family drew protests. He has since sold the property.In 2018, he accepted a $200 million investment from the Saudi Research and Media Group, a publicly traded company. The investment became a point of contention later that year, when Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who wrote a regular opinion column for The Washington Post, was murdered and dismembered in a Saudi consulate office in Turkey. The United States government concluded that the killing had been carried out by a team reporting directly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.Mr. Penske did not publicly address the investment, even as his publications reported on the pressure faced by companies with financial ties to Saudi Arabia. In some articles, the Penske outlets mistakenly reported that his company had received money from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is overseen by Prince Mohammed, rather than the Saudi Research and Media Group. After The Wrap reported on the matter, a number of Penske Media articles were updated to correct the error.“PMC has disclosed the small minority investment from SRMG to all of its stakeholders and brands,” a Penske Media spokeswoman said in a statement. “Any statement to the contrary is purely an attempt to create a false narrative. It is further disclosed in every article any PMC brand writes about Saudi Arabia.”Jay Penske watches the action at the Indianopolis Motor Speedway during a practice run before the Indianapolis 500 in 2012.Brent Smith/Reuters, via Alamy‘This Guy Is Serious’Ten Penske Media employees interviewed for this article describe their boss as someone who stepped up for publications in trouble. “Jay Penske came in and saved this business,” said Dea Lawrence, the chief operating and marketing officer of Variety. “He is a hero to the publishing world.” His company has more than 1,350 employees, according to the Penske Media vice chairman Gerry Byrne, nearly half of them journalists and content creators.After the company bought a controlling stake in Vibe and Billboard, which have offices in New York, he flew there to meet with each new employee. “This was in the middle of the pandemic, and so I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is serious!’” said Datwon Thomas, the editor in chief of Vibe. Mr. Thomas met Mr. Penske for lunch at Bryant Park Grill in Midtown. “Jay knew a lot about me and my background,” he said, “and he knew a lot about Vibe.” Four other Penske Media employees said that Mr. Penske makes a practice of meeting with each of his new employees soon after acquiring a property.Mr. Penske will sometimes play hardball with the staff. When Tatiana Siegel, a longtime Hollywood Reporter journalist, accepted a job at The Ankler, a subscription newsletter started by the show business writer Richard Rushfield that has expanded under the former Hollywood Reporter top editor Janice Min, Mr. Penske put a stop to the move. Ms. Siegel’s contract included a noncompete clause, and Mr. Penske held her to it. The parties eventually agreed that Ms. Siegel would decamp to Rolling Stone, committing 80 percent of her work to it, with the remainder going to The Ankler.“Jay has been by far the best owner I’ve worked under at The Hollywood Reporter,” said Ms. Siegel, who joined the magazine in 2003. “My situation was unique, and it was resolved amicably.”The upstart publications Puck and The Ankler pose a new threat to Penske Media’s hold on entertainment coverage. The competition is reminiscent of what took place more than a decade ago, when Deadline had the old guard quaking. Mr. Rushfield said that start-ups may have an advantage over entrenched publications, because they are not beholden to anyone.“If you’re at a publication like Variety, for example, the number of things a studio has over you is hard to keep track of,” Mr. Rushfield said. “You need friendly access to studio executives and agents gift wrapping your scoops. You need people for covers. You need people to speak at your conferences.” The result, he continued, is that “publications with different business models, and more aggressive reporting, can elbow their way in.”Mr. Penske may be able to counter the newcomers through the magic of synergy. The addition of South by Southwest has given him another way to promote all things Penske. The latest iteration of the festival, which is in Austin, Texas, included concerts hosted by Rolling Stone and live episodes of podcasts from The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline.Shortly before the first day, Variety published a glowing article headlined “‘SXSW Is My Whole Life’: An Ode to the Austin Festival as It Makes Its In-Person Return.” You can read it online, where, up until Oscar voting ended on March 22, it was surrounded by For Your Consideration ads. More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      Rolling Stone Hires Daily Beast Editor as Its Top Editor

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      Noah Shachtman, an experienced online journalist with a newsy sensibility, will lead the pop music bible founded in 1967.Rolling Stone has chosen Noah Shachtman, the top editor of the news site The Daily Beast, as its next editor in chief, the magazine announced on Thursday, calling on him to continue the transformation of the 54-year-old pop music bible into a digital-first publication.Mr. Shachtman, 50, said in an interview that he plans to bring along The Daily Beast’s newsy approach and web metabolism when he starts his new job in September.“It’s got to be faster, louder, harder,” he said. “We’ve got to be out getting scoops, taking people backstage, showing them parts of the world they don’t get to see every day.”Mr. Shachtman will succeed Jason Fine, who stepped down in February after five and a half years as the top editor to take a job overseeing Rolling Stone’s podcasts, documentaries and other media ventures.The selection of Mr. Shachtman was driven by Gus Wenner, Rolling Stone’s president and chief operating officer and a son of Jann S. Wenner, who co-founded the magazine as a 21-year-old college dropout from a San Francisco apartment.The elder Mr. Wenner sold a majority stake in Rolling Stone to Penske Media, the publishing company led by the auto-racing scion Jay Penske, in 2017. Two years later, Penske Media bought the remaining stake from BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore.“I love that his strength is in an area where we need to get stronger,” Gus Wenner, 30, said of Mr. Shachtman. “But he’s certainly got the skill set on long-form pieces, and that’s going to continue to be super important, too.”“Five years from now, I want Rolling Stone to be at the forefront of content creation across any platform: films, podcasts, the website, the magazine,” Mr. Wenner added. He cited, among other things, the Rolling Stone channel on the gaming platform Twitch.Before becoming the top editor of The Daily Beast in 2018, Mr. Shachtman covered technology and the defense industry as a freelance journalist and an early blogger. He later founded and edited the Wired blog “Danger Room,” a winner of a National Magazine Award in 2012.He brought to The Daily Beast a hard-hitting style reminiscent of New York’s tabloids. In recent years, the site, which the editor Tina Brown and the media entrepreneur Barry Diller started in 2008, kept a close watch on the Trump administration, the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case and conservative media outlets.Tracy Connor, The Daily Beast’s executive editor, will serve as interim editor in chief after Mr. Shachtman’s departure next month, the chief executive, Heather Dietrick, announced in a staff memo. Ms. Dietrick added of Mr. Shachtman: “Under his guidance, we made a bigger impact and reached more people in diverse formats than ever before. He was at our helm but also in the trenches every day.”Mr. Shachtman said that Rolling Stone would continue to cover pop music, digital culture and the entertainment industry, and that its outlook would often be skeptical. Some critics have contended that the magazine has sometimes veered away from journalism into fandom.“Rolling Stone’s at its best when it’s both celebrating great art and taking down bad actors,” Mr. Shachtman said, adding that he has little interest in cozying up to celebrities.In a statement, Mr. Penske said of Mr. Shachtman: “His experience, journalistic integrity and thought leadership make him the ideal choice to take this iconic brand into the next phase of growth and innovation.”Mr. Shachtman in Brooklyn with Rolling Stone’s chief executive, Gus Wenner, who said the magazine had become profitable again.Guerin Blask for The New York TimesA money-losing enterprise as recently as three years ago, Rolling Stone is now profitable, Mr. Wenner said. The monthly print edition, with a circulation of roughly 500,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, is profitable by itself, he added.In 2018, the magazine returned to its old large-size format, 10 inches by 12 inches, after a decade on newsstands in the more common 8-by-11 size. Rolling Stone started charging for online access last year. It attracts around 30 million unique visitors each month, Mr. Wenner said.Mr. Shachtman and Mr. Wenner are white men at a magazine known for publishing in-depth articles on white male rock gods like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger when the baby boom generation was ascendant.“We’re in a different era now,” Mr. Shachtman said. “No one appreciates the legacy of Rolling Stone more than me. But legacy is very different from future.”Mr. Wenner said he had considered “a very diverse and wide range of candidates” for the job of leading the magazine.“Diversity continues to be one of our biggest priorities, and it’s something Noah and I and Jay discussed at great length,” he added. “Continuing to bring in incredible leaders within the staff from all backgrounds will be a top mandate and priority of Noah’s.”Although he is a longtime journalist, Mr. Shachtman knows his way around a chord progression. From college into his 30s, he played bass in a series of ska, reggae and dub bands, including the 3rd Degree and Skinnerbox NYC. Along the way he played New York’s CBGB, Washington’s 9:30 Club and other storied venues.“He was good at appreciating the groove and holding things together,” said Jon Natchez, a saxophonist in the rock group the War on Drugs, who played alongside Mr. Shachtman in a ska band called Stubborn All-Stars.Mr. Shachtman, who lives in Brooklyn, said he had kept tabs on the latest in youth culture through his two sons, noting the social gaming platform Roblox as an example.“Getting into the spaces that are too weird, too confusing and too dangerous for parents to be in — that’s where Rolling Stone’s got to be,” he said. More

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      Silk Sonic or J. Cole Has the No. 1 Song, Depending on the Chart

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      In a rare but not unheard-of discrepancy, Billboard and Rolling Stone named two different singles as the week’s biggest.What is the No. 1 song in the country? These days, it depends on the chart.On Wednesday, Billboard announced, after a two-day delay, that “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic, the new retro-soul project of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, reached the top spot on the Hot 100, the magazine’s singles chart and the industry standard since 1958.But days earlier, the competing Rolling Stone 100 crowned J. Cole’s new “Interlude” as its No. 1, with “Leave the Door Open” just No. 10. On Billboard’s latest chart, “Interlude” reached only as high as No. 8.Even more strange, both charts are now owned by the same company. When Rolling Stone introduced its rankings in 2019, they were positioned as competitors to Billboard’s, with different data sources and methodologies. Rolling Stone chart positions are often hyped by fans and press agents, but have not proved a major challenge to Billboard’s authority.Last year, a deal between the publishers of Rolling Stone and Billboard brought both companies under a new joint venture, P-MRC. Jay Penske, the young media entrepreneur who represents half that deal, controls those publications as part of a portfolio that now also includes The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, WWD and Vibe. P-MRC also has a 50 percent stake in the South by Southwest festivals.A spokeswoman for MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm, said the delay in the magazine’s Hot 100 was a result of data anomalies that were being investigated by its chart experts, and was not related to Rolling Stone having a conflicting song at No. 1. It is also not the first discrepancy: Early this year, Olivia Rodrigo’s blockbuster “Drivers License” topped the Billboard chart for eight weeks, but Rolling Stone’s for only five.Rolling Stone looks at songs’ sales and popularity on audio streaming services, but not radio; for the Hot 100, Billboard considers sales, audio and video streams, along with radio spins. Still a persistent head-scratcher in the music world is why the same company maintains two separate and competing charts.In a slow week for albums, the Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo reclaims the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart with “A Gangsta’s Pain.” It had the equivalent of 61,000 sales in the United States, mostly from streaming, according to MRC Data. “A Gangsta’s Pain,” which had opened at the top two weeks ago, then dipped to No. 2, had the lowest sales number for a No. 1 album since early January, when Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” notched its third time at the top with 56,000 sales in the post-holiday doldrums.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is in second place, while last week’s top seller, DJ Khaled’s “Khaled Khaled,” falls to No. 3 in its second week out. Justin Bieber’s “Justice” is No. 4.Dua Lipa is in fifth place with her album “Future Nostalgia.” Lipa’s song “Levitating,” featuring the rapper DaBaby, is No. 2 on Billboard’s singles chart thanks in part to its popularity on TikTok. More