LVW to RS: We’re bigger than you!

Bigger is better. We swear.

By Scott Dickensheets

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 | midnight

Change has arrived, all right, and not the kind we can believe in. It arrived in the mail: Rolling Stone. Well, it said Rolling Stone on the cover and had the same middle-of-the-road music coverage inside. But it didn’t feel like the old Stone. Because it isn’t: The venerable music mag has ditched its singular oversize format in favor of standard magazine dimensions. That is, it looks like every other magazine on the stands. No doubt it made sense in some boring, business-plan way—paper costs saved, distribution increased (it now fits in more magazine racks). But in achieving those gains, it lost something, too. Not just column inches, but a largeness, an expansiveness, literalized in its paper size, that was part of its identity. Now it might as well be Blender. Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Weekly: still livin’ large-paged! No moss gathering here.