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It all began with a mistake. Yves Bongarçon first picked up Rolling Stone in 1973, thinking it was a glossy dedicated to Mick Jagger's legendary band. It wasn't, but as a French teenager living near Lyons, he was fascinated with the picture it painted of America's counterculture. "That error changed my life," says Bongarçon.
Later, he hung out on the California coast, learning to ride the waves and listening to the Beach Boys. Now he has set his surfboard aside to run his favorite magazine's new French edition, which launched Oct. 3. The editorial director has his work cut out for him. He isn't the first to try a French edition of Rolling Stone. An earlier version failed in 1987.
"VERY FRAGMENTED." Conditions for a launch are no better these days than they were in the 1980s. The media sector remains in the doldrums, and advertising sales are contracting worldwide. Even the U.S. edition of Rolling Stone has fallen on hard times and is undergoing an editorial overhaul. Add to that a sector full of specialized music magazines, and it's clear that Bongarçon, who has been with parent group IXO Publishing since its earliest days, may have a difficult slog. "The French market is very fragmented. There is no major music magazine," says Didier Si Amour, a French journalist who specializes in media.
What to do? Bongarçon's goal is to give the magazine an unmistakably Gallic look and feel while preserving the prestige of the Rolling Stone brand. He relies on a team of French journalists to generate 80% of the articles.
If the strategy succeeds, Rolling Stone may be making an entree into unexplored European markets. Successful custom-country editions have been going strong in Germany and Spain since the late 1990s. For Bongarçon, Rolling Stone's philosophy can be easily exported and adapted. "It's the principle of Rolling Stone: Society, people, the world -- all seen through the lens of the music world," says Bongarçon.
NO PUFF DADDY. Bongarçon is intensely concerned that the new edition achieve a balance between French and U.S. culture. It includes a 16-page "Best of the U.S." English-language supplement, which attempts to bridge the trans-Atlantic gulf between each nation's version of cool. Bongarçon takes a strategic approach with his cover subjects, as well. The first issue featured both British rocker Peter Gabriel and French rocker Rita Mitsouko. But the next two covers will be devoted exclusively to French stars. Notes Bongarçon: "An artist like Puff Daddy can easily be on Rolling Stone's cover in the U.S., but not in France."
The results? So far, so good. The 196-page first edition sold out, with 70,000 copies moving off the shelves. Michel Vitte, the commercial director for the music-publishing arm of IXO, is asking for $3,000 per ad page, in line with the industry average and main competitor Les Inrockuptibles, which has a circulation of about 40,000. He insists he gave away no free ad pages in the ad-heavy initial issue -- an indication that word-of-mouth drove its success. Says Vitte: "Rolling Stone has prestige over here."
He's also developing branding and marketing partnerships with the bands that appear in Rolling Stone's pages. For instance, Rolling Stone stickers grace the front of French copies of British alternative-rock group Underworld's new album, 100 Days Off. And French rocker Jean-Louis Aubert, the local equivalent of Bruce Springsteen, is now on tour with financial backing from the French edition.
OLD-FASHIONED GUY. One nagging question concerns the possibility of editorial tension between Bongarçon and his U.S. counterparts. The U.S. edition is having an identity crisis of its own. It will ditch its notoriously long feature articles in favor of shorter reads. The magazine replaced legendary editor Bob Love in April with Ed Needham, who headed British men's magazine FHM.
Here's the rub: Bongarçon is an unabashed devotee of the classic Rolling Stone style. But with so much copy written and edited in France, conflicts with American editors over content should be minimal, Bongarçon believes. All he owes them is their cut for the brand, which is less than 10% of the French edition's profits.
Bongarçon has his finger on the pulse of the European market. More often than not, he exchanges ideas with Spanish and German Rolling Stone editors (circulation in Germany already approaches 80,000). He's talking about introducing an Italian version. For that, he could draw on his experience of taking other IXO titles such as Rock Sound and Groove to other countries. All of Europe will be then rocking to Rolling Stone.
Djemai and Passariello are editorial assistants in BusinessWeek's Paris bureau Edited by Thane Peterson
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