Spin Magazine

The pop music world was thrown into a spin this week when the owners of Vibe magazine, the nation's leading hip-hop journal, bought Rolling Stone's chief rival in the rock field. Wednesday's $42-million purchase of Spin magazine gives Vibe Ventures a powerful one-two punch in the publishing world and raises numerous questions in the record industry. Among them: Will the new owners shift Spin from its alternative rock base to a more mainstream focus?

In a mixed verdict in the sexual harassment trial of Spin magazine and its publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., a federal jury Wednesday awarded $110,000 in compensatory damages and back pay to a former Spin employee but declined to assess punitive damages. After five grueling days of deliberation in U.S.

Spin magazine Publisher Bob Guccione Jr. hired and promoted young women based on their personal relationships with him and presided over an office where women were fondled and subjected to locker room-style comments by male editors, according to testimony in federal trial here. In the trial, now in its second week in U.S.

new york -- Spin Magazine's print subscriptions jumped in January at least in part for a surprising reason: Its pages were posted on the Web for free. Spin Digital, a highly interactive online version of the magazine, quietly made its debut on MySpace three weeks ago. It feels more like the print edition of the rock-music monthly than its Internet cousin, Spin.com. In fact, the digital version is the print edition.

The instrument of the young model's death is his own black belt. He appears to have hanged himself in a doorway. An unbuttoned white shirt and black blazer cling to his slender chest, which is covered in a film of sweat. A thin gold cross lies in the hollow of his neck. His pupils are dilated; his charcoal-black hair protrudes in oily clumps; his mouth flops open as if in a final, failed gasp for air. The image is sexually charged, suggestive of the aftermath of autoerotic asphyxiation.

The editor of Spin magazine filed harassment and assault charges Wednesday in New York against shock-rock star Marilyn Manson, accusing the singer of enlisting his bodyguards to attack him after a Monday night concert at the city's Hammerstein Ballroom.

Spin magazine Publisher Bob Guccione Jr. said he will appeal part of the $110,000 sexual-harassment verdict lodged against him and the magazine's ownership group by a federal jury in New York, the New York Post reported. The newspaper also quoted elderly Harlem resident Alma Green, a juror in the three-week trial in U.S. District Court, as saying she initially was the only one of the nine panel members who thought plaintiff Staci Bonner deserved a cash award. "I caught hell," she said.

"L.A. is heroin in city form." --ANN MAGNUSON, Spin magazine

Rolling Stone, since its launch in 1967, has been at the center of the rock 'n' roll universe, its leading journal of developing trends and the No. 1 arbiter of taste. To be featured on the magazine's cover is to reach a milestone, as Dr. Hook only half-joked in his 1972 novelty hit "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone.' " Its circulation alone--more than 1.2 million--makes Rolling Stone the king of rock journals.