Snapped up by the Jaws of the Mediasaurus

Wired Magazine Sold

Miller Time: One Week

Seasoned Wired watchers had a full week to toy with the idea that the magazine just might get fun again. On Friday, May 1, San Jose Mercury News technology gossip columnist Chris Nolan passed along a rumor that Wired Magazine had been sold to the Miller Publishing Group LLC, a Los Angeles-based company that puts out the alternative music monthly Spin; hip hop chronicler Vibe; Where, a travel magazine aimed at the young and the restless; and a handful of sports and lifestyle magazines it bought from the New York Times Co. last October.

"[T]his could be an interesting match," Nolan wrote. Despite co-founder Louis Rossetto's insistence to the contrary, the investment banking firm Lazard Freres & Co. had been shopping the magazine around for months, and most bets were on Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., owned by print media giant and Wired Ventures Inc. shareholder S.I. Newhouse. But Nolan speculated that Miller's collection would be "better marketing and editorial partners for a magazine like Wired. It's a matter of attitude."

Then, on Friday, May 8, official word was released that Wired Ventures had sold the magazine to Advance Media after all, specifically, to the Condé Nast Publications unit. Suddenly, Wired's partners were the far more staid and upscale Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair.

What exactly happened behind closed doors will likely remain a mystery for some time, but according to most accounts, the Miller purchase was very close to becoming a reality. Indeed, Robert Miller himself confirmed those rumors when he told the Netly News, "We were expecting to sign the final documents Wednesday night or Thursday morning." Perhaps Newhouse, reportedly a fan of the magazine and an early investor who would later bail out the parent company in times of need, simply couldn't let his investment slip away.

On the other hand, perhaps he had been reluctant to take on a magazine in the midst of an editorial makeover, especially since another high profile title of his, The New Yorker, is still struggling to attain profitability after years under the dynamic and redefining editorship of Tina Brown. Then again, perhaps he saw the reported $80 million he shelled out for Wired as mere pocket change, having recently unloaded "the crown jewel of American publishing," Random House, into the hands of Bertelsmann AG for a cool billion and a half.

Regardless, the sale could hardly have been more traumatic for Newhouse than it was for Louis Rossetto and his partner, Wired Ventures president Jane Metcalfe. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Rossetto and Metcalfe called the staff into the cafeteria the Thursday evening before the announcement, "Rossetto was reportedly too choked up to speak," and Metcalfe did all the talking. The Chronicle reports one witness as saying, "Jane was clearly saying goodbye to everybody."

Rehearsing for the Hit

Few magazines with circulations in the hundreds of thousands were as defined by a single personality as Wired was when Rossetto was still at the helm. Back in January 1993, when the first issue appeared, Wired was utterly unique. Magazines such as Mondo 2000 and Australia's 21C had established a certain underground status as "cyberculture" publications, while at the other end of the rack, the countless MacThis and PCthat titles furnished software and hardware reviews, and somewhere in the middle, the established and stodgy business magazines covered the ups and downs of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Rossetto's stroke of brilliance was to identify the related strands woven throughout the edgy post-Cold War, technology-obsessed world of the new decade and to fuse them into a singular vision, a specter haunting what he was sure was a postindustrial society: the Digital Revolution, "sweeping through our lives like" -- everybody, now -- "Bengali typhoon"

The dramatic debut that seemed to have come from nowhere hadn't, really. Rossetto and Metcalfe had rehearsed throughout the late eighties in Amsterdam with a magazine called Language Technology, featuring an "Electric Word" section and articles on hypertext, interactive screenplays and "the on-line phenomenon." Desktop publishing was said to be transforming the office, while Minitel was channeling the French libido through the wires.

Even the design of Language Technology, while certainly not pretty, was an attempt to convey an avant aura, a fusion of the hip and the inevitable. The world was changing, better get on board.

Nevertheless, Language Technology eventually tanked, and after being snubbed by the New York media establishment, Rossetto and Metcalfe wound up in San Francisco, which just happened to be the right place at the right time. Its proximity to Silicon Valley, its famed reputation as a refuge for eccentrics, artists and free thinkers, and even the overwrought stereotype of the rainbowed, New Age, graying hippie lifestyle, made San Francisco the perfect match for Wired. And, as it turned out, vice versa. Wired's role in putting San Francisco on the map as the center of new media innovation in the mid-nineties is not to be underestimated.

The package put together by twelve people in a warehouse -- the infamous day-glo colors, the cyberpunk author on the cover predicting the future of war, the tagline, "Get Wired", in exotic Asian lettering -- all but flew off the shelves. When the awards rolled in and the magazine went monthly half a year ahead of schedule, Wired was a certified hit.

Wired was a quirky bundle of contradictions that clicked. The geeks, hackers and hipsters that gave the magazine its "street cred" rubbed shoulders with the suited icons of Wired's average reader: youngish, white, male, highly educated and filthy rich.

In the mid-nineties, while the Internet was beginning to catch flame as a hot topic in mainstream media, Wired was introducing the readers of dead tree media to the first generation digerati, also seemingly walking contradictions: Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked visionary; John Perry Barlow, the suave rancher; Nicholas Negroponte, the hype meister of the MIT Media Lab.

As early as the seventies, Stuart Brand had written in the pages of Rolling Stone that computers had become "cool". To Brand's Whole Earth menagerie of hippies with gadgets, Wired added upstart entrepreneurs such as TCI's John "Road Warrior" Malone and ultralibertarians like George Gilder of Forbes ASAP.

Not only were computers cool as Zippies, but giant corporations like Viacom, according to one Wired cover, didn't suck. This was Rossetto's version of Rolling Stone for the nineties, the magazine he'd always wanted it to become.

Once Again, With Day-Glo

Louis Rossetto didn't just admit to his libertarianism, he advertised it. "The last of the anarcho-capitalists," Wired's media critic, Jon Katz, once called him, and not without a tinge of admiration. But Rossetto's ponytail and sneakers veneer belied his readiness to red pencil the content of the magazine until it reflected his own unique view of the world and its future.

The legendary office with its doors for desks, hot pink ethernet cable and in-house chef seemed a cool enough place to work, but few employees dared to publicly criticize the editorial line which held that once the planet was wired, government would be obsolete and we would all be happy as busy bees buzzing around in the global hive mind.

Even as the magazine continued to soar, its circulation expanding and its heavy stock pages bulging with ads, critics were beginning to pick apart the package before Wired was two years old. Gary Chapman fired off a few early shots in the pages of The New Republic in late 1994. The Baffler was an independent zine few had even heard of at the time, but its scathing critique singed Rossetto, who would denounce it again and again.

By 1995, as terms like "net criticism" were introduced to counter the techno-euphoria that prevailed in the mainstream media, Wired itself had become a point of contention, sparking flame wars and a special issue of Educom Review in which prominent writers were asked to riff on the pros and cons of the magazine.

The argument between Wired supporters and dissenters echoed the older online debate on libertarianism that had been running circles around Usenet and bulletin boards for years. The magazine was drawing the ugly clash out into the open where its sources would be analyzed by the likes of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (The Californian Ideology, German version) in Europe and Paulina Borsook ("Cyberselfish") in Wired's own backyard.

Things came to a head in 1996 when Wired Ventures attempted to go public -- twice -- and Wall Street scoffed. It didn't help that Rossetto had implicitly linked the viability of Wired's philosophy and its business plan. Nor did it help that Wired Ventures had wildly overextended itself, launching a line of books and a television program with MSNBC, spreading its online presence, HotWired, out over a handful of separate channels (Netizen, Packet, etc.), and whispering that no less than five new magazine titles were in the works.

The irony of Wired's attempts at creating a multimedia empire was not lost on readers who remembered essays such as Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton's "Mediasaurus" in Wired 1.4:

Even Jon Katz publicly argued that television represented everything that Wired was supposed to have been against -- for which, of course, he was publicly lambasted by Rossetto.

After the failed IPOs, Wired Ventures was in serious financial trouble. The company had poured ridiculous sums of money into its phantom empire, had gambled and lost and desperately needed help. When help arrived in January 1997, it didn't come without strings. The details are unclear, but most analysts assume that in return for their investment, the suits demanded a say in how Wired conducted its business.

Ironically, after a series of layoffs, the cancellation of the television program, more than a few book projects and a general scaling back of its online presence, the magazine actually turned a profit within a year, and even Wired Digital is expected become profitable by the end of 1998.

Nevertheless, Rossetto, who had grown uncharacteristically quiet on the media front, stepped down from his post as CEO of Wired Ventures, and Katrina Heron, a veteran of Newhouse magazines Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, replaced him as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.

Wired had dared to tango with the Mediasaurus, and the monster snapped back, dividing and conquering.

What Now?

As Nicholas Negroponte openly admits in the introduction to his 1995 bestseller, Being Digital, there's something funny about the argument for a thoroughly digital future made via a medium based on atoms rather than bits. Funny, but not nonsensical. Still, if the argument holds water, the future has arrived at Wired Ventures, whose properties, now that the magazine has been sold, are all strictly bit-based.

The future of these online entities has been the subject of recent speculation by Scott Rosenberg at Salon and Owen Thomas at The Red Herring Online. Both argue that HotBot might serve as a valuable centerpiece from which to build, in conjunction with Wired News and a consolidated version of the other remnants of HotWired, the beginnings of a Web portal, that magic buzzword du jour implying a one-stop, personalized end-all and be-all window onto the world so many other new media mergers are aiming to be.

Fine. Maybe, maybe not.

The situation Wired Ventures currently faces is one of cut-throat competition between far too many online brand names for far too few eyeballs. Just as online entities such as Salon and FEED are looking to print media as a way to bulwark the brands they've built online, Wired Ventures has traded the heart and soul of its brand for cash to feed the iffiest of its holdings. If it pursues the portal strategy, Wired Ventures is up against Netscape and Excite, Lycos and Tripod, Yahoo! and GeoCities, and yes, just now coming around the corner, Microsoft.

Wired, the magazine, however, has just been rescued from this vicious free-for-all and delivered to the world of exclusively print media, where the competition is just as cut-throat, yet nonetheless blessed with just a dash more of merciful time.

Katrina Heron, now back home at Newhouse, has had "preliminary discussions with James Truman," editorial director of Condé Nast, and claims to "really like his ideas." Not that she'll discuss them, of course.

Still, one has to sympathize. She's inherited a magazine created and honed for in the image of its maker's mind, and as she told Salon, "I've been making changes every issue as quickly as I could after becoming editor in chief in December. There are many more changes I'd like to make."

The role of the owner of the magazine is not to be underestimated. Yes, it was fun to ponder the Wired, Spin, Vibe constellation when it looked as if Miller Publishing would take on that role. For one thing, there are several writers already contributing to both Spin and Wired; New York-based David Bennahum, for example, is a contributing editor to both magazines.

The aura of hip was essential to Wired's success in its early years, and Wired lost it during the long, drawn-out debate on libertarianism in the mid-nineties. Executive Editor Kevin Kelly tried to put the best face on Wired's situation in 1997 by telling The New York Times that Wired had become "post-cool."

Louis Rossetto's last hurrah, the January 1998 "Change is Good" issue, was for the most part a parade of elderly faces yapping the same old techno-utopian yap. Wired had become so "post-cool" that even bothering to criticize it was seen as passe. When Richard Barbrook dared to drag out the old California Ideology routine earlier this year, he was bashed for it more than once.

Robert Miller's collection of magazines, however, might have provided a pool of talent for recognizing and riffing on issues, ideas, and most importantly, outlooks that aren't yet "post-cool." Wired has often been cast as a lifestyle magazine, and one could easily imagine the front of the book sections evolving into the sort of tables, sidebars and graphs mapping the corners and niches of popular culture and measuring them in degrees of hipitude that one finds in Spin, yet with a Wired twist.

Fun to think about, but ultimately, a dead end. Elaborating on the old Wired-Tired dichotomy would be playing on one of the old Wired's drawbacks, not its strengths. Many of the back issues of Wired are keepers, but not for the newsy sections like "Electric Word." As with The New Yorker, it's the long and deep articles, the voyages around the world following the literal wiring of the planet with cable, the detailed portraits of unique thinkers like Ted Nelson, and the vital chapters of legendary online history such as Katie Hafner's piece on The Well that keep readers from lining the cat litter box with issues of Wired once they've read them all up.

The pages of the April issue of Spin, its Special 13th Anniversary Issue, are already dry, crisp and yellowing, and so is much of the "news" therein. Further, the Miller Publishing Group is comprised of a slew of recently purchased titles; the foundation has not yet settled.

S.I. Newhouse, however, is hardly on shaky ground and will not be going away anytime soon. The deep pockets and the patience Newhouse has demonstrated during the long transformation of The New Yorker will come in handy as the new Wired takes form.

On its way toward a new identity, Wired will have to steer a course through a crowded field of competitors, few of which existed when Wired debuted five years ago. If Wired remains a monthly publication, it should avoid the territory staked out by John Battelle's Industry Standard, for example, a new weekly focusing on the business end of new media and featuring several Wired alumni on the staff. Further, there are only so many Valley and Alley heroes to be profiled, and certainly not enough to spread among The Standard, Red Herring, Upside, and to a lesser extent, Business Week, The Economist, Forbes, and so on and on. One also suspects that the "new economy" buzz is simply not going to last.

Wired has already traded in its "Get Wired" approach with a sturdier "Tomorrow Today" editorial line. Not as catchy, but then, getting wired just doesn't have the zing it used to, either. The new line suggests, among other things, a greater focus on technological innovation, and on that front, the competition is easier to beat.

MIT's esteemed Technology Review has a new editor who has dramatically moved the magazine toward Wired territory but certainly doesn't pose much of a threat yet. The new Wired could do what Scientific American and The New Scientist have not yet been able to do by marrying coverage of technology and its social impact with media criticism, pop culture, economics and politics in an all-encompassing yet non-partisan exploration of the immediate future.

If that seems like a vague and daunting program, consider that it doesn't vary too terribly from the project Louis Rossetto launched in the first place. Only this time, without the Bengali typhoon.

David Hudson lives in Berlin as freelance writer and runs the online magazine REWIRED.