I was given a subscription to Wired Magazine this Christmas and I agree that it’s been great recently (see comments by Jason Kottke & Jason Levine).
In an interesting move, they have published the entire contents of the latest issue online – not samples, not just the lead story – every word that appears in the print version is on the web. They’ve also started pulling content from the Wired Magazine site into the Wired News site. In the past, they’ve been known for their church/state-like separation between the print and web publishing divisions.
I welcome the acknowledgement that the appeal of a magazine goes beyond text and images. People will still buy the dead-tree version even though they can access all of the content on the web.
Part of that church/state separation has to do with the fact that Wired Magazine doesn’t own or run Wired News, Hotwired, or any of those other sites. Terra Lycos does. Wired doesn’t even own wired.com (Wired is listed as the registrant on the domain, but Terra Lycos pays all the bills…I’m not sure why Wired is still on there).
True. I remember seeing, or hearing, or reading, an interview with one of the HotWired guys a few years ago. He was bragging about how there was no staff overlap between Wired and HotWired – totally different crew, office, and content.
I dug up an old salon article (classic salon layout) about both the Wired News acquisition by Lycos and the Wired Magazine acquisition by Conde Nast.
Personally, I really hope the upcoming redesign truely does fix “another common problem, defined in Anderson’s words as, “One of my concerns was that too much of Wired’s content was too easily confused with ads.”. This was/is always something that really got my goat.
Yeah, Edward Tufte defines “chartjunk” as “data presentations that seek to attract and divert attention by means of display apparatus and ornament.” This always got me about Wired. At least they are honest to called it InfoPorn – the term ‘info’ is a bit flattering.