January 7: Jann Wenner

Jann Simon Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine with Ralph Gleason in 1967 with $7,500 in borrowed funds, was born in New York on this date in 1946. He was active in the Berkeley Free Speech movement and with Ramparts magazine. Wenner was a hands-on publisher who conducted many of Rolling Stone’s best interviews and built the magazine’s circulation to 1.5 million by 2006. Among the journalists whose careers he helped to launch were Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Klein, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, and photographer Annie Leibovitz. Wenner also owns Us Weekly and Men’s Journal magazines, and was a co-founder, in 1983, of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation (where he has exercised undue influence, critics say, over who gets in and when). In 1995, Wenner left his 27-year marriage to partner with Matt Nye, a fashion designer. He has three children with his ex-wife, Jane (who is still his business partner), and three with Nye.

“I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t think I’d ever heard the word ‘marketing,’ let alone ‘branding.’ I just thought it was a good idea, and I had a lot of energy and a love of music. . . . We just made it up.” —Jann Wenner