Target Audience Research - "Rolling Stone"

Rolling Stone is an American monthly magazine that focuses on popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California in 1967 by Jann Wenner, who is still the magazine's publisher, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its musical coverage and for political reporting by Hunter S. Thompson. In the 1990s, the magazine shifted focus to a younger readership interested in youth-oriented television shows, film actors, and popular music. In recent years, it has resumed its traditional mix of content.

Rolling Stone's website features selected current articles, reviews, blogs, MP3s. The website also has other features, such as searchable and free encyclopedic articles about artists, with images and sometimes sound clips of their work. The articles and reviews are sometimes in a revised form of the published versions. The website also carries political and cultural articles and entries selected from the magazine's archives.

The site at one time had an extensive message-board forum. By the late 1990s, this had developed into a thriving community, with a large number of regular members and contributors worldwide. However, the site was also plagued with numerous Internet trolls and malicious code-hackers, who vandalized the forum substantially.The magazine abruptly deleted the forum in May 2004, then began a new, much more limited message board community on their site in late 2005, only to remove it again in 2006. In March 2008, the website started a new message board section once again, then deleted it in April 2010.

Rolling Stone devotes one of its table of contents pages to promoting material currently appearing on its website, listing detailed links to the items. The magazine also has a page at MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

On April 19, 2010, the website was updated drastically and now features the complete archives of Rolling Stone. The archive was first launched under a for-pay model, but has since transitioned to a free-with-print-subscription model. In the spring of 2012, Rolling Stone launched a federated search feature which searches both the website and the archive.

The website has become an interactive source of biographical information on music artists in addition to historical rankings from the magazine. Users can cross-reference lists and they are also provided with historical insights. For example, one group that is listed on both Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time is Toots and the Maytals, with biographical details from Rolling Stone that explain how Toots and the Maytals are responsible for coining the term "reggae" in their song "Do the Reggay". For biographical information on all artists, the website contains a directory listed alphabetically.

The magazine is also published internationally in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Croatia, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Middle East (Dubai), Russia, Spain, Turkey, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

While Rolling Stone does not advertise itself (I doubt it needs to anymore because of its recognition and relative merit) it does have a newsletter which it sends monthly to its 1,385,800 subscribers. The website also attracts more than 22.2 million unique visits to the website annually and 13.2 million mobile visitors.

If I were to replicate anything from the Rolling Stone it would be to have my own journalistic perspective when writing my articles. This may work to attract new readers.