Este concurso intentará mantener en vida el mito según el cual la revista todavía contrata (y retrata) a la juventud cruda y aventurera. La realidad es otra: RS es un negocio maduro en el que los becarios poco fotogénicos hacen fotocopias, mientras que los concursantes van a cubrir Lollapalooza. Tad Friend, para el New Yorker, explica.

Por Tad Friend

Reality shows exploit dubious myths by turning them into contests—you really can lose thirty pounds, snow a billionaire into giving you a dream job, win the cheerleader's heart with a rose. Simply assemble the cast from a Benetton ad, serve drinks, and start removing the chairs. Someone will always emerge triumphant. MTV's "I'm from Rolling Stone" applies this durable formula to six twentyish writers who intern at the magazine for a summer, competing for a one-year contract as a contributing editor. The two music-culture manufactories seem to have devised the program to preserve the bewhiskered legend that they still hire, and chronicle, raw youths.

In the sixties and the early seventies, Rolling Stone actually did work something like that. The critics Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs broke into the magazine in their early twenties, and Cameron Crowe was only sixteen when the editors sent him on the road with the Allman Brothers Band—an episode that inspired Crowe's 2000 film "Almost Famous."

Nowadays, Rolling Stone is a grown-up business, one whose non-camera-ready interns are in the office making photocopies while the "interns" are out covering Lollapalooza. Despite this rickety foundation, however, the show holds together, because the kids, selected from more than two thousand applicants, are touchingly optimistic—they don't know they're working for the man. Some of them seem to believe that their responsibilities will include jamming about poverty in Africa with Bono and then addressing the global situation in an all-night writing marathon fuelled by mescaline and unchained id. (That's how I do it, but then I'm a seasoned professional.) Others have no idea what's going on. Pete, the beer-pounding Australian crew jock, has barely written anything before; Tika, the self-satisfied African-American lesbian, loses her notebook while writing her first piece; and when Krishtine, the grill-wearing Asian-American hip-hop sprite, gets the you're-in phone call from the magazine's founder and editor, Jann Wenner, she might as well be talking to Archduke Ferdinand. 

KRISHTINE: I'm so excited! Ian, is it? Ian?

JANN: Jann.

KRISHTINE: Jann?

JANN: Jann.

KRISHTINE: Spell it for me

Krystal, an attractive blond poet, is the only one who really seems to know the magazine, at least as it was in the days when Annie Leibovitz spent weeks on the road photographing the Stones (and doing drugs with them, as Wenner rather meanly suggested in a recent "American Masters" about Leibovitz on PBS). When Krystal leaves her sepulchral boyfriend behind in Salinas—forever, it seems clear—she jokes about running off with Steven Tyler, and in a video Q. & A. posted on rollingstone.com she talks about hoping to party with Keith Richards. When Slug, the front man of Atmosphere, tells Krystal, "I totally want to make out with you," her coy laugh suggests, Well, you're not a legend like Keith Richards—you couldn't be my grandfather—but, then again . . . No one seems to have got the memo about sucking face with your subjects.

The interns haven't yet learned to keep their distance, to pigeonhole the work with insidery adjectives (duff, proggy, already dated), and then to award it a safe three stars; they're thrilled to be allowed onstage, punching their fists in the air at song's end. Their cluelessness induces nostalgia: this is what life was like before we were trammelled by BlackBerries and the knowledge of why Jann Wenner mattered.

Colin, a long-haired nineteen-year-old from Eugene, Oregon, is the most wide-eyed—the sort of guy who's inadvertently left behind in the chill-out tent when the van leaves. When he interviews We Are Scientists, he arrives completely unprepared, grasps his pen like a garden tool, and finally mumbles to the lead singer, "I think I have that shirt, actually." After an editor questions the use of "Boho" in his report, he says, "Isn't that short for Brooklyn, or something?" We root for Colin to figure it out, hoping that figuring it out doesn't, this once, amount to some form of selling out.

By making the writers show up for daily news meetings and giving them tight deadlines, the show seems to argue that the values of high school, where you are judged on your cool quotient, must now give way to the values of the adult world, where you are judged, in significant part, on your work. Yet it's not clear that the work the kids are given to do is, in any meaningful sense, real. On rollingstone.com, they're referred to as "characters," and their pieces are preceded by the disclaimer "This is not an official Rolling Stone article. What follows is a submission to the MTV reality show." When Wenner first calls Russell—a twitchy former resident of a juvenile institution who, it's clear from the articles on the Web site, is much the best reporter and critic of the six—the editor says, chortling, "I hear you're a real good writer." "Google me!" Russell retorts, which underlines the issue: why hasn't Wenner, the purported arbiter here, read his stuff yet?

Maybe because it doesn't have much to do with picking a winner. The process of prose composition is fairly boring to watch, and shows like this prize drama and charisma—the old high-school values. Russell is the standout in this category, too: he stashes a cigarette behind his ear, breaks furniture, arm-wrestles Method Man, and takes a flying leap into a garbage container to impress Lupe Fiasco. He's also bipolar, arrogant, and wildly self-destructive. Soon, he no longer bothers showing up at the office. After several pep talks go unheeded, Joe Levy, the executive editor, finally explodes, "You are royally screwing it up!" Chastened, Russell promises that he'll get an alarm clock and arrive at work ten minutes early from now on. He adds, irrepressibly, "And then I'm just going to pull out my balls and flap them around."

Is a free-baller what Rolling Stone wants? Back when the culture used to pause to digest Hunter S. Thompson's latest screed, perhaps. On the evidence here, Rolling Stone now seeks someone skilled at working the words "rolling" and "stone" into every conversation. Reality shows often resemble extended brand-management commercials, and we can almost hear the producers' whispered reminders when Russell remarks, "I think I'm on my way to being an amazingly talented journalist, here at Rolling Stone," and when Joe Levy tells Pete, who wrote a piece while drunk, "If you don't take this more seriously, you're not going to last a summer, here at Rolling Stone." After a while, "here at Rolling Stone" begins to sound like "here at Jonestown."

Some of the interns weren't yet born when Wenner played a Rolling Stone editor very like himself in the 1985 film "Perfect." Even then, he was candid about the fact that journalism about rock stars isn't a gonzo expedition in search of elusive truth so much as a mutually wary, mutually beneficial transaction. When Carly Simon complains in the film about being the subject of a hatchet job, Wenner's character replies, "Oh, come on, Carly. The only thing worse than being written about is not being written about." The smartest reality-show contestants understand that the show's ostensible prize isn't nearly as valuable as the exposure along the way, the personal branding, the chance, perhaps, even to land on "The Surreal Life." As Krishtine says, "I'm trying to, like, make myself kinda known on the scene as Rolling Stone's hip-hop celebrity." She won't win the job, but she couldn't care less.

So we're buoyed when Colin, of all people, is the first to break through on rollingstone.com. When his musings on We Are Scientists pop up onscreen, he rises gleefully: "I'm a winner! I'm a winner!" Russell tries to help celebrate by grabbing a chair to bash him with. But Colin ducks the slam-dance opportunity in favor of gambolling about, Aquarian style, while crying, "I'm gonna call my mama!" Then he does. The producers probably wish he'd called his papa, instead, so they could have cued up "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," but it's still a sweet moment. The last one, maybe, before it all becomes just a job.

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