Wired (magazine)

A sample of Wired covers. Wired 1.01 (the premiere issue), with Bruce Sterling's face on the cover, is shown to the right.

Wired is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. It reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics.

Its editorial stance was originally inspired by the ideas of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, credited as the magazine's "patron saint" in early colophons.Wired has both been admired and disliked for its strong libertarian principles, its enthusiastic embrace of techno-utopianism, and its sometimes experimental layout with its bold use of fluorescent and metallic inks.

From 1998 to 2006, the magazine and Wired News, which publishes at Wired.com, had separate owners. Throughout that time, however, Wired News remained responsible for reprinting Wired magazine's content online due to a business agreement made when Condé Nast Publications purchased the magazine, but not the website. In July 2006, Condé Nast announced an agreement to buy Wired News for $25 million, reuniting the magazine with its website.

History

The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe in 1993 with initial backing from software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and industry pundit Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, who was a regular columnist for six years, through 1998. The founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr), beginning with a 1991 prototype and continuing through the first five years of publication, '93 - '98.

Wired was a great success at its launch and was compared to Rolling Stone for its innovation and cultural impact. The magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design in its first four years.

At inception Wired was also often compared to a predecessor, the magazine Mondo 2000. They both shared a creative use of design, and a cyberculture subject matter. Early issues of Wired showed a clear influence of Mondo 2000, but over time the two magazines diverged as Wired developed a more distinctive style. Mondo 2000 retained its more subversive emphasis of cyberculture, while Wired shifted emphasis more and more in a mainstream direction. Wired also toned down the extremities of design that made it difficult to read. The founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was formerly one of the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review, and he brought with him many contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first issue, Wired 1.01 had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson who was featured on Wireds cover in its first year.

Despite the fact that Kelly was involved in launching the WELL, an early public access to the Internet, Wireds first issue (1.01) de-emphasized the internet, and primarily talked about interactive games, cell-phone hacking, digital special effects, military simulations, and Japanese otaku. However, the first issue contained some references to the internet, including online-dating and internet sex, and a tutorial on installing a "bozo filter." The last page, a column written by Nicholas Negroponte, was written in the style of an e-mail message, but contained obviously fake, non-standard e-mail addresses. By the third issue in the fall of 1993 the 'Net Surf' column began listing interesting FTP sites, news groups, and email addresses, at a time when the numbers of these things were small and this information was still extremely novel to the public. Wired was among the first magazines to list the email address of its authors and contributors.

The magazine was quickly followed by a companion website HotWired, a book publishing division HardWired, a Japanese edition, and a short-lived British edition, Wired UK.

HotWired itself spawned dozens of websites including Webmonkey, the search engine Hotbot, and a weblog, Suck.com. In June 1998, the magazine even launched its own stock index, The Wired Index, since July 2003 called The Wired 40.

The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded closely to that of the dot-com bubble.In 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO. The initial attempt had to be withdrawn in the face of a downturn in the stock market, and especially the internet sector, during the summer of 1996. The second try was also unsuccessful.

Rossetto and Metcalfe lost control of Wired Ventures to financial investors Providence Equity in May 1998, who quickly sold off the company in pieces. Wired was purchased by Advance Publications, who assigned it to Advance's subsidiary, New York-based publisher Condé Nast Publications (while keeping Wired's editorial offices in San Francisco).

The backlash

Some early adopters were turned off by Wired's later style and content. Its "McLuhanesque" design, by embedding the message into the medium of presentation, made actually reading articles a chore for some readers. Advertising pressure took space away from longer articles. Wired's journalism began to overemphasize consumption at the expense of hacker production and attempted to make "being a geek" fashionable.

In 1995, Gary Wolf, an editor of Wired (and later, the author of Wired: a Romance) published "The Curse of Xanadu" which offended its subject, Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib and an internationally recognized pundit. The article portrayed Nelson as an outlier geek and Xanadu as a failure despite the fact that Nelson (who hated HTML and the philosophical basis of the Web as actually implemented) anticipated the "wiki" approach in Xanadu by enabling two-way communication and builtin credit for contribution.

Because financially Wired had become rapidly attractive to investors, its content after 1995 showed an increasing ambivalence about Wired's target demographic. As opposed to the hobbyist magazines of the 1970s, Wired seemed to imply that there were right and wrong ways to be a geek and that "being digital" could be reduced to owning rather than making artifacts.

Paulina Borsook, a former editor of Wired, based part of her book CYBERSELFISH on her experiences at Wired. She concludes in her book that high-tech's default political philosophy is less liberal than libertarian, and that libertarianism allows too much space to the will to power. Wired's record of overreaching may result from a libertarian culture intolerant of short-term failure.

Wired crossed a critical boundary, for its advertisements had became funnier and more readable than its editorial content, which is dangerous to circulation.

After the dot-com crash

During the dot-com boom, Wired had to compete with the multitude of technology reporting and sources available on the Internet, including The Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and the Red Herring. It also faced competition from the multitude of technology reporting and sources available on the Internet. With the crash of the dot-com boom, however, Wired outlasted its competition, and found a new direction under Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, who took on the job in June 2001.

Under Anderson, Wired has produced some agenda-setting articles, including the April 2003 "Welcome to the Hydrogen Economy" story, the November 2003 "Open Source Everywhere" issue (which put Linus Torvalds on the cover and articulated the idea that the open-source method was taking off outside of software, including encyclopedias as evidenced by Wikipedia), the February 2004 "Kiss Your Cubicle Goodbye" issue (which presented the outsourcing issue from both American and Indian perspectives), and an October 2004 article by Chris Anderson, which coined the popular term Long Tail.

The November 2004 issue of Wired was published with The Wired CD. All of the songs on the CD were released under various Creative Commons licenses, an attempt to push alternative copyright into the spotlight. Most of the songs were contributed by major artists, including the Beastie Boys, My Morning Jacket, Paul Westerberg, David Byrne, and Le Tigre.

In 2005 the magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the category of 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers. That same year Anderson won Ad Age's editor of the year award.

Recent promotional events by the magazine include 2005's Wired NextFest presented by General Electric at Navy Pier in Chicago and the Wired Store in SoHo, NY.

Over the years, Wired's writers have included Paul Boutin, Stewart Brand, Gareth Branwyn, Po Bronson, Douglas Coupland, James Daly, Joshua Davis, J. Bradford DeLong, David Diamond, Patrick Di Justo, Cory Doctorow, Esther Dyson, Mark Frauenfelder, Simson Garfinkel, William Gibson, George Gilder, Steven Johnson, Bill Joy, Leander Kahney, Lawrence Lessig, Jaron Lanier, Steven Levy, Spencer Reiss, Rudy Rucker, Joshua Quittner now the editor of Business 2.0 magazine, Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz (futurist), Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Gary Wolf.

References

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Wired UK

*Wired UK: what nearly happened, an article on the rise and fall of Wired UK
*The short-lived Wired UK
*List of Wired UK employees
*Wired UK archive - reproduces some of the articles that appeared in the magazine.

Wired (magazine): Encyclopedia BETA