Why start another rock magazine?
I feel there’s space in the marketplace. When I left Rolling Stone to work on the Vibe launch, I started looking around at what I was interested in [and] what my friends were talking about, and I saw there wasn’t anything that was speaking to them. Nine or 10 years ago, that meant Vibe. And now this means something we want to do ourselves. Obviously, it’s a difficult time in the economy, but every other person says it’s a good time because everybody with a half-assed idea isn’t out there trying to chase down money. Even if someone came down and handed us a check tomorrow, we couldn’t launch until toward the end of the year at the absolute quickest. If there’s any sense that things are going to get any better at all, you need to lay your bet down now. Your time at Spin coincided with the appearance of mainstream artists on the cover: Incubus, Matchbox 20, Sugar Ray, Creed. How did you take the criticism? I think that Spin historically covered mainstream artists–it’s just a different ma
