Plain and simple, it was a major miscalculation on the part of Rolling Stone magazine to put Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its August issue cover.

Let’s face it, when was the last time anyone said, “Hey, did you read that neat article in Rolling Stone last month?” Ten years ago? 20?

The editors knew they would get folks talking if they put the accused 19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect on its cover. In most circumstances the self-portrait—or selfie—taken by Tscarnaev of himself was not unique. After all, they knew that the New York Times had run the same photo months earlier with very little feedback.

Rolling Stone’s editors knew it would generate some much-needed “buzz” for a publication that had layoffs last year. Its print circulation had, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, “limped along in the past several years, up about 2.5 percent since 2007.” In 2012 it had about 1.4 subscribers.

Somewhere along the line, though, the buzz met a tipping point where it turned downright ugly and out of control and turned into a crisis. When stores like CVS and Walgreens announced they would not carry the magazine it began to snowball out of control. Rolling Stone relies on stores to sell 75,000 copies every two weeks.

There are now stories on Internet sites urging people to boycott Rolling Stone’s advertisers. Even worse, reportedly many people are cancelling their subscriptions to the publication. Those are the two areas that will hurt the magazine the most.

David Carr at the New York Times analyzed the tremendous backlash.

“In other words, it was not the image of Mr. Tsarnaev that ignited outrage, it was the frame,” wrote Carr. “With its headline callouts to Jay Z and Willie Nelson on the current issue, and a history of hosting rock luminaries, there were suggestions that the magazine was conferring iconic status on a man who has been charged with a brutal act of terrorism.”

Carr noted the story was an act of journalism.

“The story and cover treatment of Mr. Tsarnaev was clinically an act of journalism. Commercial and editorial motives were at work, as they are when almost anyone publishes anything,” he wrote.

“People who read beyond the cover discovered that the pretty boy on the front appeared to have deep, nascent ugliness in his heart. Just as you can’t judge a book (or a magazine) by its cover, the kid behind that confident selfie was, it seems, a big, hot mess.”

It’s often tough to judge when something will generate “buzz” and when it will create a backlash. In this case, the editors at Rolling Stone made a bad misjudgment that could be the beginning of the end of the magazine. Time will tell.