My Advice to Wired Magazine: Steal a Page from Dave Eggers
Over at BoingBoing Gadgets, Joel Johnson recounts his days at Wired and Wired.com, perhaps the two most ironically mismanaged media properties in the digital age. Go over and read his piece.
With Wired plumbing the depths of Condé Nast’s portfolio in terms of revenue, it’s time to restructure Wired and Wired.com so they compliment each other. My recommendation? Make Wired a quarterly with a shelf life.
Don’t get me wrong: Wired is great. It’s just fat. The Mystery Issue was awesome. Their feature work could be the best in the biz. Joshua Davis’ long-form journalism is particularly inspired. But their standard, bite-size magazine coverage feels dated; material much better addressed by blogs. Case in point: Fetish. This monthly upfront of “new” gadgets is old by the time the editors put it to bed. Not only that, the coverage is naively optimistic (I seem to remember them breathlessly covering the Gizmondo ages ago) and lacks the context that a BoingBoing, Engadget or Gizmodo provide. Their short-form columnist dispatches would be better handled by a Slate-like enterprise. Hell, most of those people already maintain blogs.
But the Gizmondo Fetish example is an apt one, as it nicely highlights Wired’s valuable feature journalism. Randall Sullivan’s tale behind the device has already been optioned for an upcoming film.
Chris Anderson, you can save Wired. Strip down your crew, give your blogs room to breath and take BART over to the Mission and talk to Dave Eggers about turning your monthly into a quarterly. Make Wired something people hoard on bookshelves; something people wait to crack open until they have a few hours to lose themselves in it. Focus on shelf life and leave the timeliness to the blogs.
