Noah Shachtman was up in Vermont last year, “thinking about just quitting,” when Gus Wenner rang with an opportunity. “I was burnt out after seven-plus years of running the insane asylum—I mean that in the best possible way—that is the Daily Beast,” he told me. But the chance to take the reins of Rolling Stone quickly recharged him. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” he recalled. “I was so excited.”

Such excitement was palpable on a recent visit to Rolling Stone’s Manhattan headquarters, as Shachtman invited me to stick around while he met rising pop star Tai Verdes, who was appearing on the magazine’s Twitch show. He practically bounced into the room and announced in a single breath: “I’m-Noah-Shachtman-I’m-the-editor-of-Rolling-Stone.” Verdes thanked Shachtman for being a fan as the editor rattled off his favorite songs, and assured Verdes he wasn’t like this with every Twitch guest.

Shachtman, an extremely online, F-bomb-dropping Brooklyn dad who played CBGB before establishing himself on the national defense beat, has breathed new life into Rolling Stone since taking over as editor in chief one year ago. He’s increased the publication’s online metabolism in a way that’s reminiscent of how he led the Daily Beast, a site known for punching above its weight with scoops across politics, media, and pop culture. But the breakneck pace is also whiplashing staff at a legacy print magazine whose web presence seemed, until recently, like an afterthought. His hard-charging style in the newsroom and swagger on social media has chafed some staffers, prompting debate over whether Shachtman’s obsession with scoops and tabloid instincts are best suited for the iconic music and culture magazine—or, perhaps, are just what it needs to stay relevant in the digital age.

As he kicks into year two atop the masthead, Shachtman, 51, made clear he won’t be taking his foot off the gas. “Are we trying to reach a maximum audience? Fuck yes,” he said. “Are we gonna try and get into the biggest stories of the day across the board? Like, for sure. Do I like being scrappy? Of course I like being scrappy. Do I think that’s a virtue? I do. I do think it’s a virtue. This isn’t, you know, Town & Country,” he said. “This is fucking Rolling Stone here, and scrappy and edgy is part of the DNA.”

You could see his fingerprints immediately, in the exclusives and edgy headlines, and if for some reason you couldn’t tell there was a new sheriff in town, he’d spend the next year telling you so on Twitter, welcoming people to the “new Rolling Stone” and vowing to call out “bad actors,” including past cover stars like Eric Clapton, who has come under fire for being a vaccine skeptic and giving money to a music group with similar views. “The new Rolling Stone is going to confront monsters, even—especially—if it means confronting monsters the magazine helped elevate,” Shachtman tweeted last November in promoting an investigation into sexual abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson, a project staffers tell me got under way prior to the new editor’s arrival—in other words, old Rolling Stone. (Manson has denied the allegations.) The magazine sparked controversy last spring for a piece exploring the “final days” of late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, with one interviewee, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, calling the piece “sensationalized and misleading.”

Shachtman can be almost cartoonishly aggressive about journalism. “He once compared the Daily Beast to SEAL Team 6,” as one former staffer recalled. His focus on taking big swings could be limiting: Another former Daily Beast employee said Shachtman seemed more interested in music-related controversies than music itself. “It always seemed like he preferred scoops about artists who had done bad things, like sexual assault stories,” they said, “rather than pieces about their work.”

Shachtman, once a staffer on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, says he got into journalism to help pay rent in between gigs as a ska and reggae bassist. He tells a story—on a few podcasts, and in our interview—about how, in the early 2000s, he felt he had to choose between music and journalism and chose the latter. (Music journalism, a bridge between the two, didn’t work for him: “You know when something hits you so hard, and is so important, and is so emotional to you, that you almost can’t write about it?” he said.) Shachtman covered national security and technology, establishing himself among the earliest journalists doing so primarily for an online audience. “How digital news worked and how to take a wonky subject and make it accessible for a broad audience—he really got those things early,” said a journalist who worked with him at Danger Room, the award-winning Wired blog Shachtman founded in 2007.

His intensity in the newsroom was already apparent. “Sometimes it was a bit much for me. But I get where it’s coming from,” the Danger Room journalist said. “The one thing that will absolutely kill a reporter is not getting attention or interest in their stories and that’s something Noah is certainly not guilty of. Even people who thought he was too demanding would talk about the excitement he brought to the newsroom,” they said. “And you kind of get one with the other.” As Shachtman acknowledges, “I know I’m a different cat and I know I’m intense.”

Many people who’ve worked with Shachtman—I spoke to over a dozen—will tell you he excels at the journalism part of the job, and more than a few will say that, despite being well-intentioned, he fell short as a manager. “I think that he could be, if he took it seriously, but I don’t even think he thinks of that as part of the job,” said one former Daily Beast staffer, among those who described him as at times immature and lacking boundaries. “With certain reporters he’d treat them buddy-buddy, and then use that intimacy to kind of berate you in really personal terms,” said another. A third former Daily Beast staffer recalled how, when she told her exit interviewer that some top editors could work on their communication skills with women (without naming names), the exit interviewer correctly guessed that she was talking about Shachtman. (Shachtman declined to comment on this former staffer’s recollection.)

Several people mentioned how, in promoting the new Rolling Stone, they felt Shachtman could come across as disparaging the work they were doing before he arrived. Asked about this perception, Shachtman cited “day-to-day chats and Slacks with people” in which “I gush pretty hard for my colleagues, and I think you can see a little bit of that on social.” Shachtman said “giving someone a pat on the back in the office is nice, but sometimes giving praise on Twitter can be even better.” The system can also be alienating to some. “You feel silly he’s made us even care about those interactions,” said one staffer. Shachtman appeared to tweet himself into a corner in August, in a tweet praising only his new hires. A few days later, he thanked a group of veteran staffers.

I asked Shachtman how he sees himself as a manager. “Learning,” he said. “No reporter gets trained on being a manager,” a response that surprised me because, while often true, Shachtman has been in a managing position for more than eight years. (He also hasn’t fully given up reporting—when we met, he’d just come from a source meeting—though recognizes “it’s gotta be my side hustle.”) Other things he’s learning: how to keep up with the torrent of new music coming out, which “can be daunting,” and what goes into putting out a monthly print edition. “I haven’t been involved in a print magazine at this level ever,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think there was already a huge wellspring of talent” and “have incredible affection for the place from not just its legacy, but its present,” Shachtman told me. But “it’s gotta grow to stay alive.”

Launched in 1967, Rolling Stone captured the counterculture and the era’s rock royalty—the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan—with vivid writing and dazzling photography (by the likes of Annie Leibovitz). While the magazine is perhaps best known for rich artist profiles and reviews, Rolling Stone reported early on rock’s dark side, notably the Altamont concert tragedy, and broke ground covering politics (Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo dispatches from the ’72 campaign trail) and the press (Timothy Crouse’s “Boys on the Bus”). Through the years, its writers have also memorably chronicled money (Matt Taibbi’s dissection of “the great vampire squid” Goldman Sachs stands out) and war (Michael Hastings’s “The Runaway General,” for one).

The legacy of Rolling Stone has been extensively chronicled, including by my colleague Joe Hagan in his 2017 book, Sticky Fingers, and cofounder Jann Wenner dropped his own memoir in September, telling Vanity Fair that he felt “grateful to have been alive in an era of rock and roll—the talent, and the poets, and the literature, and all the passion of it.” And over the course of the magazine’s 55-year existence, as competitors from Creem to Spin emerged, there’s been chatter over whether Rolling Stone still had the pulse of youth culture. Twenty years ago, Salon proclaimed the magazine had “lost its reason for being” and likened its efforts to cater to a younger audience as “some aging hipster playing Twister until his back gives out.”

Though Shachtman, with his salt-and-pepper beard and short-sleeve button-down, could be seen as the aging hipster in question, the Gen Xer makes his disdain for boomer content clear. Debuting the revamped RollingStone.com—a redesign that’s been years in the making—he proclaimed, “Finally, we’ve got a website that doesn’t make you feel like you’re wearing bell-bottoms.”

The new editor is certainly driving Rolling Stone onward, but the larger question is toward what. Given the magazine’s legacy of long-form journalism, it’s unclear to some staffers what, with this premium on being fast and first, they’re chasing; whether what he’s proclaiming the new Rolling Stone is really just a version of the old Daily Beast. He doesn’t hate the comparison. “The best of Rolling Stone was incredibly inspirational to me at the Daily Beast,” Shachtman recently told me in his midtown office. “And so if I can pay that back a little bit, you know, round trip, that’s great.”

“There was a path that this place could have gone down, which was, you know, rock-and-roll museum. That was the danger. Now look, before I even got here, Rolling Stone had deliberately chosen another path, but I just kind of pushed things further in that direction,” Shachtman said. One year in, “I think the place is harder-hitting than it was,” he said, “and hopefully we’re having a little more fun too.”

He’s looking to double down on Rolling Stone historically being a smorgasbord of politics, music, and cultural coverage. When I asked what he’s shooting for, he told me, “At the heart of Rolling Stone is kind of this double switch, where we’re trying to bring young people in with pop culture and then slip them some politics and change some minds. And then similarly, we’re trying to get maybe a little bit of an older crowd that’s interested in politics but doesn’t know shit about today’s pop music, and try and educate them too.”

Rolling Stone’s political coverage since Shachtman arrived has largely been defined by insidery Trumpworld stories similar to those of the Daily Beast. Scoops are often bylined or co-bylined by Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, both of whom Shachtman poached from the site as soon as his noncompete was up. In the past several weeks, these have included reports of Donald Trump’s anger at Florida governor Ron DeSantis, members of Trump’s orbit talking about his embrace of QAnon, Trump’s fixation on Emmanuel Macron’s love life, things Trump has told his lawyers about classified documents, and what he has said privately about Mehmet Oz. (Another recurring byline on Trumpworld stories, Nikki McCann Ramírez, is a new hire.) The magazine has also closely covered the fallout from the January 6 insurrection, with reporter Hunter Walker contributing several scoops.

The transition to the kind of digital-first operation that Shachtman wanted Rolling Stone to be from the get-go was rough—particularly in the early months of his tenure, as the editor’s order of business was first to expand coverage and then staff up to match it. “I think we were sort of thrown into turmoil as a staff when he arrived,” said one current staffer. This mismatch took a toll on people, with some streaming for the exits because they didn’t jibe with Shachtman’s demanding pace and vision for Rolling Stone, and others because they simply didn’t jibe with Shachtman.

“It’s good to have someone who can be a bull in a china shop, but I think there are ways of changing inertia without having to be an asshole,” as a former Rolling Stone staffer put it.

There’s always a degree of attrition following a changing of the guard, especially when the new regime is trying to redefine the place they’re taking over. But Shachtman has been clumsy in broadcasting what’s happening inside Rolling Stone. I’m told staff were particularly baffled at Shachtman’s tweet one month in, “Just blew up my first magazine spread at the 11th hour ama.” He doesn’t apologize for the way he presents himself online, where on his first day at Rolling Stone he joked about trying to find the cocaine closet. “I like fucking around on social media” and hope it gives people “permission to kind of be who they are as individuals,” said Shachtman, though he admits that the October tweet on blowing up the print edition went too far. “I really regret that one,” he said. “I thought I was being funny and it wasn’t funny.”

People say workflow is getting better, and credit Shachtman for making a bunch of good hires, many of them women and people of color. “He’s trying to do the work that should have been done a long time ago,” one staffer said. “But as much as I think he is trying to make the newsroom diverse, I just don’t believe he can do enough based on his personal experience. With him, Rolling Stone will never get to where it needs to be. It has to be a woman; it has to be a person of color. Otherwise it will be the same white male perspective that’s always been there.” (Shachtman declined to comment on this perspective.)

The elder Wenner started handing his son the keys when Gus Wenner was in his early 20s, but it was Jay Penske, whose Penske Media Corporation currently owns the title, who promoted the 32-year-old to chief executive this past January. Wenner was closely involved in the search for Rolling Stone’s next editor, which began in February 2021, when Jason Fine—described to me as innocuous, if not particularly popular—moved to a new role as director of content development. Wenner said he thought Shachtman was capable of taking on a staff—80 on the editorial side—“entrenched” in a certain way of doing things. “We needed to reintroduce ourselves,” said Wenner.

Not everyone was on board. When I told Wenner that some were surprised to see what he called “a long and broad search”—he interviewed almost 30 people—end with a white guy, he responded, “To be honest, I was too.” But “for the very specific thing that I was looking for, he fit the bill,” Wenner said. The mandate was two-fold: restore Rolling Stone’s relevance, particularly among young people, and transition it into a digital-first newsroom. Shachtman had “understanding and connection with the first, and a real know-how…around the second,” Wenner said, adding that Rolling Stone has been a “sizable digital operation and business for some time” but needed “to turn that corner and not look back.”

Rolling Stone still has a sizable print circulation, at a half million, but it’s “not the focal point of our business and it’s not the focal point of our creative operation,” said Wenner. Still, he adds, the cover “gives us an opportunity to produce an iconic image every single month.” In August, Harry Styles became the first-ever cover star to appear simultaneously across all 14 international editions of Rolling Stone, whose UK version caught some heat for crowning him “the new King of Pop.” In September, NBA star Stephen Curry became the first athlete to grace the cover in six years. Beyond print, Wenner and company have their hands in several pies, from live events (the magazine bought a majority stake in a music festival this year) to film and TV. “I don’t want to be too reliant on one revenue stream,” said Wenner, who said the company will be “very, very profitable” this year.

Shachtman is very hands-on when it comes to day-to-day coverage, debating everything from headlines to aggregation ideas in public Slack channels. “Traffic is kinda scary bad for the first time all year. Let’s be a little extra aggressive today, ok?” he wrote, tagging two editors, in one message reviewed by Vanity Fair, chiming in 35 minutes later with a link to a Daily Mail story about a famed rock photographer harassing a Jewish bakery: “Hmmmm maybe?” (They ended up doing an item on it.) The message has been made clear to staffers, with an editor giving a presentation in January on “THE KEYS to a KILLER ROLLING STONE HEADLINE.” One bullet point read, “Get emotional”; another, “Feel free to be a dirtbag.” There have been some hiccups. Being immediate is “the ticket to get on the bus these days,” Shachtman said, and “perfect is not on the menu at any place.” Staff realize they can’t be operating at the pace of a print magazine if they want to be in the daily conversation, but they’re also painfully aware of just how damaging it can be to get a story wrong. It’s taken the magazine time to build back its reputation after the infamous implosion, and subsequent retraction, of a 2014 report on the alleged rape at the University of Virginia. There is only so much wiggle room.

The numbers suggest Shachtman is on the right track. On-site traffic is up 18% year over year, social following is up nearly 50% year over year (more than 850,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram), and Rolling Stone draws more than 30 million monthly readers online, according to a PMC spokesperson. Digital subscriptions, which launched in 2020, have doubled in the last year, a PMC spokesperson said, to 23,000. “A lot of that growth I can directly attribute to Noah,” said Wenner. Rolling Stone’s online demographics have been trending younger since 2020, with the 18–34 demographic rising from 34% in 2020 to 37% in 2021 to 40% in 2022. Today, 63% of on-site traffic comes from people under 44; that number was 54% in 2021.

“This first year was really about just getting into the news mix,” says Shachtman. The larger goal is “trying to turn these episodic wins into something that’s like, this is just who we are, and this is just who what we do,” he said. “If I can use the language of the music industry for a second, this has gotta turn from one-off singles into a hit factory.” He recognizes that “the more we do it, the higher the bar gets raised,” but spoke only in broad terms about how they’ll rise with it—“bigger” stories, “deeper” investigations. When I asked Wenner what Shachtman’s priorities should be going forward, he repeated some of the same points he’d made in interviews a year earlier, such as putting Rolling Stone “back in the middle of the zeitgeist.” But he added that now that Rolling Stone is “back in the game” with breaking news, it’s time to pair that with “more home run swings” on the long-form feature front.

In an email to the newsroom in early September subject-lined, “That was crazy. That was amazing,” the Rolling Stone editor sounded like Jack Black in School of Rock as he went point by point through a list of August highlights, from scoops on the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz (“Example eleventy billion of how our deep, deep roots in rock & roll continue to generate scoops”) and rapper A$AP Rocky (“One of the biggest, most explosive mysteries in hip-hop. And we solved it”); the website redesign (“one of the more successful digital makeovers a major media brand has ever done”); and coverage of the VMAs (“Comprehensive. Eye-catching. Fast as fuck”).

“It’s kind of never been a rock magazine, and it especially can’t be a rock magazine now,” Shachtman said, bending down to tie his colorful Asics. “It can’t be a music magazine only. It’s gotta be broader than that—it’s gotta be more important than that.”