lady-gaga-rolling-stone-cov If you don’t care much about politics, you could be forgiven for not paying much attention to last week’s story of how General Stanley A. McChrystal shot off his mouth in a Rolling Stone interview (to such an extent that he actually apologized for his remarks before the article was even published!), and was subsequently canned and replaced in the Afghanistan theater.

For me, the most interesting thing is not the story itself—the kind of scoop every magazine editor dreams of—but the rather odd secondary furor that the New York Times reports has surrounded the story’s circulation.

On Monday afternoon, Rolling Stone circulated a PDF of the article to the Associated Press under certain restrictions, as a “sneak preview” from which they could run highlights and excerpts, to drum up publicity for the issue of Rolling Stone that would contain the full piece.

However, the PDF got requested by other news organizations (the New York Times article isn’t clear on whether it was requested from Rolling Stone or from the A.P.) and then passed around, with copies ending up going to McChrystal and the White House—and Time Magazine and Politico (who received their copies from third parties, not directly from Rolling Stone) put the whole PDF up on their own websites on Tuesday morning—hours before Rolling Stone could publish the article on its own website.

Techdirt and the Nieman Journalism Lab suggest that Rolling Stone was hoping that the publicity would combined with lack of web availability of the article would drive people to buy print copies of its magazine. They note that this is where the magazine’s print-centric approach leads to trouble in today’s Internet-based world.

Talking Points Memo is particularly acerbic in pointing out that, even as the McChrystal interview was every other news site’s top story, “Rolling Stone‘s site led with Lady Gaga’s (admittedly impressive) machine gun jumblies all day and didn’t even put the story online until 11:00 ET.” (And as the above picture shows, Lady Gaga, not McChrystal, was also on the cover of the issue in question. I suppose they thought she’d sell more issues.)

Time and Politico defended their behavior by saying that they were trying to cut through all the rumors that were flying by showing the actual source; Time was apologetic about it afterward but Politico doesn’t seem to have been.

And, of course, this all comes at a time when the “hot news” doctrine is being vigorously discussed in court.

The Times article concludes:

“This is not about our slow-footedness on the Web, but our right to publish on a schedule we chose. To me, this was really a transitional moment,” said Mr. Bates of Rolling Stone. “We’ve had fan sites that have published the text of some stories, but what these two big media organizations did was really off the charts. They took something that was in a prepublished form, sent out to other media organizations with specific restrictions, and just put it up.”

But it’s worth noting that it was Rolling Stone itself who sent out advance copies of its story, in advance of publication—and once you do tat, you don’t necessarily have control over who gets it next. With such a hot news story as that, what were they expecting?

The other sites that posted the story hours before Rolling Stone could seem to be the winners here. Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the story drew hundreds or even thousands of discussion comments on other sites—but on Rolling Stone itself, only sixteen. (Though it suggests this is due in part to the difficulty of using Rolling Stone’s commenting system.)

And a final note: it’s unclear what part the A.P. played in the unexpectedly wide distribution of the PDF file of the article. But it certainly would be interesting if it was a big one, given how finicky they have been about wanting others to respect the copyrights on their content—even as they have been discovered copying someone else’s.

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