Why do people read magazines? An interesting poser in view of the last decade: the era that brought us multimedia and the Internet, the cultural idea of “dumbing down”, and that saw “content” production in the media – what we read, what we listen to, what we even hear about – fall conclusively into the hands of the profit-or-die multinationals. The question is in the news pages this month following reports that landmark American music and youth culture magazine Rolling Stone is breaking with its 35-year tradition of intelligent cultural and political journalism to move into the racy male-lifestyle-mag arena, under the stewardship of British editor Ed Needham, famous for giving the world “lad” magazine FHM.

It’s been a bloody time for magazines of late in any case, as readers of the now-defunct Melody Maker and Select, to name a few, will tell you. But a number of factors in the US – the most prominent being the rise of new-lad mags like the American versions of FHM and Maxim, the post-9/11 recession certainly not helping matters – have resulted in RS’s slowly-flagging readership dropping by a massive 10% in the last 12 months alone.

The planned move towards what new managing editor Needham has referred to as a more “anti-intellectual”, “laddish” format – shorter and fewer articles, more tabloid-style gossip, more square footage of female flesh – certainly jibes with the general lowbrow movement in publishing that began with Britain’s (quite innocent, in retrospect) Loaded magazine and took the magazine world by storm mid-decade with the more aggressively alpha-male, aspirational-lifestyle, birds-cash-and-bodybuilding FHM and Maxim titles. But few thought these cultural changes would filter down to the magazine that positively revolutionised ideas of what journalism could and should do, that kicked against establishment pricks for nearly half a century from the Viet Nam era to that of Clinton and Bush Jr, and that gave a platform to groundbreaking writers like Hunter S. Thompson and PJ O’Rourke.

RS’s pedigree notwithstanding however, the fact remains that in today’s accelerated multimedia culture the “intelligent” printed word is simply not as valued by young readers as it once was, and advertisers have been effectively lured away by other titles who realise this. Also, crucially, Rolling Stone is now considered by much of young America to be the establishment. Those in search of an alt-read – however many there are of those readers left – now turn to lovingly-produced quarterlies like The Fader, specialist mags like “urban” title Vibe, local mags like (New York’s) Nylon, quirkier “little-publishing” titles like McSweeneys, and the internet.

Why do people read magazines? The question will run and run. Whether Rolling Stone does, is yet to be seen.