One brilliant and bustling day in the fall of 1988, I was in Manhattan, visiting the Rolling Stone offices on Fifth Avenue. It was an opportune time for a writer to be seen at headquarters; my latest piece for the magazine was currently on the newsstands, which still flourished everywhere, and particularly in New York. The pre-internet marketplace was limited to paper and newsprint. To be published was to be selected; you couldn’t just post something yourself; and it took millions of dollars to start a magazine. Walking along the streets of the greatest city in the world, seeing the new issue with your new piece displayed again and again and again. I guess you could say it was the old school version of going viral, with an additional you-are-there component.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone

Issue 535 of Rolling Stone featured on the cover a rising young singer named Tracy Chapman. The logo was red. The book was 119 pages printed in an outsized format, 10 by 12 inches. (The most recent Rolling Stone delivered to my house was 46 pages, 8 by 11 inches.) Inside was my account of six weeks embedded with V-13, a well-established and once-feared Mexican-American gang in Venice, California, that had fallen prey to the ravages of crack.

At 32, I was enjoying my second stint at Rolling Stone, having been recently named a contributing editor. A resident of Washington, D.C., my trips to the office on the 23rd floor at 745 Fifth Avenue were limited. I still felt the sheer buzz of being in the building: The smell of sensimilla drifting up the staircase from the production department on the floor below. The iconic Annie Leibowitz portraits on the walls—Mick Jagger, David Bowie, the naked Yoko and John! The hip-looking staff dressed in all manner of weird and fashionable get-out. After six years pulling an oar on the buttoned-up corporate galleon that was The Washington Post, it still felt like I was visiting a combination museum and theme park, the Six Flags of rock and roll journalism. You could even buy drugs downstairs in the press room.

I was sit-leaning against a desk occupied by T., one of the magazine's female employees, when I spotted Jann Wenner, the baby-faced co-founder and editor-in-chief, heading straight toward me. Though he approved my contracts and my checks, we’d never actually met.

Wenner stuck out his hand and I stood immediately at attention. Neither of us is very tall. His hair was shiny with the slickum men were using during that era of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko (Douglas is one of his best pals). Brilliant and impetuous, Wenner is the kind of man whose attention you badly want but learn to kind of regret.

Wenner is the kind of man whose attention you badly want but learn to kind of regret.

To report the crack story, I’d spent six weeks hanging out with the vatos of the Venice gang. Though we were only a few blocks from the ocean, I never saw it once—the area in between the beach and the gang’s square mile of turf was owned by the Shoreline Crips. During my time in the hood, I was shot at by a rival gang. I rode along on a retaliatory drive-by. I was handcuffed in the gutter, one knee between my shoulder blades, by cops from the infamously crooked Rampart division, part of CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). And I smoked a good amount of crack. (All of this I was allowed to put on my expense account, without receipts.) I feel compelled to add here that none of my own personal experiences were reported within the original article. It was written in third person. It wasn’t about me.

Jann Wenner Getty Images

In the first scene of the story (called “Death in Venice”) several of the younger gang members are in a bedroom smoking crack. In the story their names were changed, at their own request, to Lil Gato, Yogi, and Tequila, the last a young woman wearing a necklace of hickeys. The room is in Yogi’s abuela’s house. They are using a pipe made from a car aerial they’d broken off a random vehicle. For a screen, they employ a piece of a copper sponge, brand-named Chore Boy, available at the corner store. There’s a towel jammed up against the bottom of the door. A fan blows the smoke out the window. When the stash is played out, they start scroning for more. They begin exhibiting a behavior well known to drug users, dropping down to their hands and knees and feeling around on the floor for little pieces of crack that may have fallen. The word they used was pedacitos, little pieces.

No more than a paragraph into our very first conversation, the 42-year-old Wenner dropped down to his hands and knees in his bespoke blue pinstripe suit and began crawling around on the gray industrial carpeting of this office in this ornate deco building in the Big Apple, just across from FAO Schwartz and the Plaza Hotel and all the fly-clouded horse-drawn buggies, pretending to hunt for pedacitos.

I don’t remember what I did during all this, probably smiled like a loon. I’ve never been much of a schmoozer, which has not helped my career any I am sure. It probably did help with T., though. We ended up living together in a fourth-floor walkup in the wilds of Delancey Street, overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge.

Mike Sager Courtesy of Mike Sager​

As the 1980s melted into the early 1990s, I continued to cover drugs and the "war" on drugs for Rolling Stone—on my press pass you’ll find the photo of guy who was living pretty hard. Looking back on my years at the magazine, the single thing I am most thankful for—besides the boffo assignments, the confidence in me, the time I got to spend with Hunter Thompson at his farm and elsewhere, and the sheer privilege of having my name associated with a genuine original like Rolling Stone—was the strong commitment by Wenner to the craft of meaningful longform journalism. Meaning that they weren’t afraid to spend a few bucks to bring home the prize.

Going back to network TV, everybody knows that most kinds of journalism doesn’t pay the bills. Time spent to stories produced, the sheet never balances. But at Rolling Stone, if I was given an assignment, I was given all the resources it took to do the best job possible. With the crack story, for instance: Three roundtrip flights, seven weeks in a (dive) motel, car rental, food, drugs. For another memorable story, about the porn star John Holmes and the Wonderland Murders, the magazine gave me three trips to Los Angeles, nine weeks in all, and thousands of dollars for copies of court transcripts and legal files, without which I could never have re-constructed dialogues, collected minute details, and found other sources to interview. To be fair, the same was true for all the glossy magazines I worked for at the time, Esquire included. (“The Sharpton Strategy” was my first piece for Esquire, 26 years ago).

Three roundtrip flights, seven weeks in a (dive) motel, car rental, food, drugs.

As I think about the much-publicized and ongoing decline of traditional magazines—this reminiscence having been occasioned, of course, by the announcement that Wenner is interested in selling Rolling Stone—I’m reminded of my first day of real work at the magazine, in the winter of 1984, when I came to town for the edit of my first piece, about a colony of Vietnam veterans who’d moved to Thailand after the war. I remember in particular one afternoon, when I was in the copier room with my editor, Carolyn White, the former wife of Richard Ben Cramer, and another great journalist, Christopher Dickey. Dickey was also a Washington Post staffer. His father was James Dickey, the former US poet laureate and author of the novel Deliverance, which became an acclaimed movie by the same name.

I kept my mouth shut as the adults chatted. After a while, the conversation turned to the lamentable state of the magazine business. White was complaining that the small items in the front and back of the book were becoming more and more popular. Management was beginning to steal pages from the “well”—the section of news articles and profiles—to add more more pablum, as White called it in her honey-baked southern accent. “I’ll be surprised if we all have a job in five years,” she said dramatically.

I remember feeling my heart fall. Wait! I’ve only just arrived.

Jann Wenner with Hunter S. Thompson. Getty Images

Luckily, White was a little premature (as I write this it’s about 33 years later by my calculator). And while the health of traditional magazines seems precarious at this point, I’m going to stay optimistic. The fact is, I’m still here typing. Change is not death. It’s evolution. When I write for the internet, I know the potential for readership is much greater than paper circulation ever was. Today, when a story I write doesn’t get posted, I feel like it’s hardly been read. And who can find a newsstand anymore? Seeing whole bunches of likes and follows on your screen is a little like seeing your magazine on the stands. Maybe even better in a way. Perhaps in time, before we all have to find different jobs, they’ll get the money thing sorted out. Right now, it’s pretty tough to make a living.

Crusty as I am, I try to maintain a sense of optimism. Maybe whomever buys Rolling Stone from Wenner can do for the magazine what Jeff Bezos has done for my beloved alma mater, The Washington Post. Once pronounced terminal, that publication is now thriving—partly due to the kind of crusading spirit that has always been the hallmark of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone.

Mike Sager has been an Esquire writer for 26 years. His latest book is .