Sales of Rolling Stone’s issue containing coverage of the Dark Snow Project Greenland mission were double the average. Most of the media explanations cite the predictable reaction to attempts to ban the magazine from newsstands – owing to the placement of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover.
Rolling Stone magazine saw sales of its controversial ‘Boston Bomber’ edition double despite calls from retailers and readers to boycott the publication.
Figures released by the Magazine Information Network show sales jumped by 102 per cent over average per issue sales in the past year.
Following publication of last month’s edition, a ‘Boycott Rolling Stone’ Facebook page was created, encouraging readers to abandon the magazine.
The cover featured a picture the 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had taken of himself, which had already appeared on the cover of The New York Times. The image was accompanied by the headline “The Bomber”, followed by: “How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster”.
It looks like all that drama over Rolling Stone’s recent issue featuring alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover really paid off for the magazine.
The cover, which critics said “glamorized” Tsarnaev, was banned from pharmacies and supermarkets, denounced by Boston’s mayor, defended and trashed in the media, and even targeted in a proposed public burning campaign.
But, according to AdWeek, the issue sold more than double Rolling Stone’s usual average newsstand sales. Apparently, people wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
It could be this analysis is correct – but, still, there was the rock star treatment of Jason Box. We won’t know if we’ve succeeded in making climate science cool till fall – if Jason’s picture shows up pasted inside young girl’s school lockers- but I think its at least possible that word of mouth about the “Ice Maverick” might have been a small part of the buzz. To be fair, it could have been the piece about Willie Nelson, too…
If you still haven’t read Jeff Goodell’s piece, you can catch it online here…
There’s a raging, pent up interest in climate change. The world is changing in scary ways and yet in the rare instances in which the media does report it is blithely and with emotionlessly detached disinterest.
There’s a hunger for honestly, answers and an appropriate sense of urgency.
Dark Snow should have been the cover story. Any period in history has its insurgents, but we’ve never witnessed the beginning of an end to the great ice sheets of Greenland.
I agree, the media has no problem publishing certain research results, even with conclusions like “10 times faster than previous extinction events” – but with as you say, emotionless detached disinterest. Its like they don’t really believe the science and its consequences. This disconnect is mind numbing.
I frequently post a lot of links to news around climate change including lectures from renown professors, but the couple of hundred “friends” I supposedly have don’t bother to comment or show any interest in these as if they aren’t real threats. So I believe none of them really believe any of this stuff at all, or are just incapable of having an intelligent discussion about whether its a real problem.
I often wonder what kind of catastrophical change is needed for people to wake up and give this the attention it needs. No doubt, each year we wait with any form of real action really brings us closer to tipping points that is completely unreversable once started. This worries me greatly.
In my view, the catastrophe bar is set too high for comfort. Climate change denial is something we all suffer from, not just those very loud ones who do it for political, economic, or ideological reasons. We are stepping out of our context. The world we knew is slowly dislocating. That can seem very unreal.
Ever suffer a major injury and experience that initial feeling of shock and unreality as you think ‘wow, that’s interesting?’ The moment right before the pain reminds you you’re not dreaming? I think that’s where we are right now with climate change. The pain signal hasn’t hit hard enough yet to wake us up from the seemingly surreal. Might be different if we were more sensitive to such things.