Nobody thinks this constitutes some kind of selling out that Rolling Stone hadn’t done before. They put Charles Manson on the cover 40 years ago. It’s an image of someone in the news and it’s been printed before. It’s an attempt to be shocking and it’s kind of trite, but really, what is the big deal here?
NM, ninja’d.
This may be a generational thing. Rolling Stone and Mother Earth were the ultimate counterculture icons of my teen and college years.
Seeing Rolling Stone sell out for a quick buck makes me nauseous.
Younger people may not have the same memories that I have. (I remember when it used to be in a newspaper format). I had to hide it from my parents because they didn’t want that hippie shit in their house. 
Don’t remember people boycotting Time and Newsweek when they put O.J. Simpson on their covers.
I don’t recall RS being held up as a moral benchmark. Also, I really want to make a crack about nauseous vs nauseated.
Your statement that they’ve sold out makes me confused. How many popular but marginally talented celebrities have they put on the cover in the last couple of decades? And how did they glamorize Tsarnaev here?
Ditto. Completely tasteless. I’d boycott Rolling Stone, but since I never buy it anyway, it’s a pretty meaningless boycott.
As I read elsewhere, it’s not that he is on the cover, but how. Not like it’s the biggest deal ever, but Rolling Stone–whose entire history has been the glamorization of pop culture icons–chose to go with a glamorized, Rock Star pose of the bomber, over a mug shot/satirical cartoon/nearly anything else. People are uncomfortable with the implied subtext, that they’re elevating him to Rock Star Status–someone to be revered, like all the other pop icons they’ve put on the cover before.
Yes, Manson was also on the cover, but they did not use a Rock Star Glamour shot of him.
Yeah, how dare they use one of the photos most associated with the subject of their cover article! The bastards! Seriously, if you are going to call this glamorizing, I’ve got some Brawndo to sell you.
If the fact that he’s on the cover of RS makes you think he should be glamorized, there is a problem but it’s not with RS.
The cover looks very similar to the glamorous cover shots they feature for rock stars. Tsarnaev is a rock star and cool.It’s different when a news magazine runs that picture.
Theres so many more creative ways they could have done a cover for the story on the Boston Bomber. Something that illustrated the points they made in their article. Just running Tsarnaev’s photo or even a photo of the bombing lacks imagination. Those images were published everywhere already.
That ship sailed 30 years ago.
Rolling Stone has never been about music alone. It began as a counterculture magazine that heavily cover society and politics and it’s one of the few remaining magazines that still occasionally invests in investigative journalism.
Rolling Stone has always had one or two excellent writers in its employ and a couple times a year, they publish a long in-depth must read article.
For the last 15-20 years or so, Rolling Stone’s strongest articles have been on serious subjects like politics, civil rights, foreign policy, and, most prominently, economics.
They’re not often enough to justify a weekly subscription, but you can bet that every year there will be handful of long-form, in-depth articles that are of the best quality.
So, no, putting someone on the cover is not the same as comparing him to a rock star or glorifying his actions.
And, frankly, it’s ridiculous to suggest that a serious magazine should avoid putting a photograph of a profile subject on a cover just because it might hurt people’s feelings. Good journalism doesn’t avoid touchy subjects.
And the magazine isn’t “posing” him as a rock star. That particular image of the bomber is already an iconic image. The recreational outrage here is really juvenile.
Heh. You were obviously reading my mind in a sort of precognitive way. 
As for the magazine and the picture? Meh. I’m not even seeing much resemblance to Jim Morrison, really.
What makes that picture a “Rock Star Glamour shot”? Also, the caption calls him a “monster”. They don’t mean that in a good way.
Which is probably why he took that picture of himself. But I don’t think anyone’s going to confuse him for a rock star or think he’s cool just because of that picture.
How?
The deck on the story (“The Bomber”) is “How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster.” I can see how using this photo fits that story though the topic and the photo are both kind of trite.
Let’s just say that if Rolling Stone is campaigning to make this guy seem like an edgy iconic figure, this cover makes perfect sense.
Merged two threads about the magazine cover.
The recently deceased journalist Michael Hastings’ 2010 Rolling Stone piece, “The Runaway General” brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal.
So yeah, thinking of it as strictly a “Music” magazine is pretty ignorant.
Plus the picture of Manson doesn’t make him look crazy. It’s an illustration and to anyone who didn’t know who he is, he’d look like some hippie philosopher of the day.
Rolling Stone does some great political reporting, and has for decades, alongside the music and entertainment news.
The photo is not a “glamour shot.” It’s a selfie. It has the caption “monster” on it. It probably should have been run past a few more (appropriate) focus groups.
I don’t think they’re guilty of anything other than iffy marketing judgement.