On Tuesday morning, Rolling Stone's explosive profile of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal dominated the news cycle. McChrystal's dismissive remarks about President Obama and some senior White House figures are still leading the New York Times and Washington Post websites — and buzzing around Twitter and the blogosphere — at this writing. Politico even published the entire article online. But for many hours, one place you couldn't read about the Rolling Stone piece was on Rolling Stone's own website.
Magazine spokesman Mark Neschis told Yahoo! News that Rolling Stone generally does not put entire national affairs stories online, instead running them only in the print magazine. (One recent exception was Tim Dickinson's investigative piece this month on the BP oil spill.)
While a magazine understandably wants to reap the financial benefits of having a major, deeply reported story only available on the newsstand, the idea of holding breaking news for print doesn't easily mesh with the demands of the 24/7 online news cycle. Not to mention, with McChrystal summoned to the White House to discuss his comments made in front of reporter Michael Hastings, the public is going to want to know what he actually said.
Still, it's not as if Rolling Stone didn't want to generate buzz, as Neschis explained: "I gave an advancer to the AP."
The Associated Press got things going Monday afternoon, in a short piece about McChrystal's frustration with U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, but didn't go into all the gory details that would later surface.
NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell quickly tweeted: "Rolling Stone quotes Gen McChrystal says Amb(ret Gen) Eikenberry 'betrayed' him with leaked memo last yr doubting Karzai story is out fri."
Clearly, competitors can't wait until Friday to pick up a copy, especially when McChrystal has already been summoned to the White House. Neschis said that other news organizations requested a copy, and published more details from the magazine article. However, Neschis said that he did not provide a copy to Politico or to Time magazine's political writer Mark Halperin — but both published the entire story Tuesday.
Still, with the story published on Politico and elsewhere, the genie was out of the bottle. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski read straight from the text of the article while Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates sat at the table for an interview. (Rolling Stone itself took a few more hours after the MSNBC broadcast to break down and post the piece on its own site.)
Bates, in the "Morning Joe" interview, said that the magazine had fact-checked the piece over the previous week and that there were no objections from McChrystal before publication. Considering that McChrystal has already apologized, presumably he won't later claim he was quoted out of context.
As to how Hastings got such caustic remarks out of McChrystal, Bates explained that Hastings got "really unprecedented access" with the general and his staff.
"We reported this story over the course of several months," Bates said. "We were with him on a trip in Europe that wound up getting extended because of the volcano in Iceland. So our reporter was kind of trapped with him for about two weeks in Paris and traveling from Paris to Berlin. They couldn't fly, so they had to take a bus. So we really spent a lot of time with him and really got to look behind the curtain, and hear how he and his men, top men, talk among themselves on their own."
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