Re-Wired

With advertising revenue down, seminal tech magazine reinvents itself

Dan Fost
Chronicle Staff Writer

April 12, 2002

Change is the one constant at Wired magazine. It's almost a mantra. The magazine once even ran a cover declaring, "Change Is Good."

One kind of change Wired endured last year was not good, however: Its advertising pages dropped 45 percent, from 2,300 pages in 2000 to 1,266 pages in 2001, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

Into that post-new-economy wasteland stepped a new editor in chief, Chris Anderson. Anderson revamped the magazine's top tier of editors last year, and now he's ready to unveil his most ambitious change: a redesign of Wired.

"Stasis is what worries me," Anderson said this week over lunch at Bacar, a trendy restaurant in San Francisco's once-bustling South of Market neighborhood. "Change is something Wired was built on."

With the whole sector of technology magazines getting battered, Anderson believes the redesign will help prove Wired's continued relevance.

It had better. Wired, in its early years as a startup in San Francisco was hailed for its bold, groundbreaking designs; after its sale to Conde Nast, it continued to soar, with circulation growing to 515,000 and ad money rolling in during the dot-com boom.

But now, with Anderson, a self-described geek who's never led a magazine before, succeeding charismatic editor Katrina Heron, and the ad market in the toilet, Wired needs to find its way.

To be sure, it's a difficult time for any editor trying to revive a flagging title mired in a difficult category. "The advertising environment is bad and the publisher and editor can't do anything about it," said Steven Cohn, editor in chief of Media Industry Newsletter in New York.

The larger question is how long Conde Nast will underwrite the magazine. Historically, owner Si Newhouse has backed financially challenged publications, such as Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, if he believed in the project.

But Cohn speculated that Newhouse closing the fashion magazine Mademoiselle last year may indicate the company is less tolerant of taking big losses. It's up to Anderson to keep Newhouse happy about Wired's content and direction.

Back to the Basics

With his passion for science, technology and global politics, Anderson harkens back to Wired's early days under Louis Rossetto, its founder and editor, and Executive Editor Kevin Kelly, and indeed, he has befriended both men and seeks their counsel.

The redesign is also respectful of Wired's past, and the magazine retains an unmistakably Wired look. But in some ways, the changes are radical.

The sections that run in the front and back of the magazine -- Electric Word, Fetish, Must Read, Infoporn, Street Cred and Best -- are getting a major overhaul. Some will disappear, and some will survive only in very different form.

First of all, everything moves to the front, between the table of contents and the "feature well." The front will have three main sections:

-- "Start" will offer news analysis of people and technology, and will revive an old what's-hot-what's-not feature, "Wired/Tired," adding a new category, "Expired."

-- "Play" will be the cultural section, with one-page takes on games, music, movies and other social aspects. "Fetish," which takes an obsessive look at a techno-gadget, will run here.

-- "View" will have "opinions, ideas, provocations," including a column by Anderson and a running feature of technologists betting against each other's predictions.

Even with all the new features, the magazine still looks like Wired -- edgy, bright, modern. It doesn't have quite the neon colors that it did in its early years. It fixes 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."

The changes will be in the June issue, which will feature Steven Spielberg on the cover.

An Effective Designer

The guiding hand behind the redesign belongs to Darrin Perry, the creative director whom Anderson hired last fall. Perry had been the founding creative director for ESPN: The Magazine, a successful startup that's taken on his old employer, Sports Illustrated.

"Much of what I did at ESPN had the same vibrancy and energy that Wired magazine has," Perry said.

Yet he tried not to put too many splashy design elements into Wired, which pioneered many techniques that often get in readers' way. "We wanted to create a magazine that still held true to the faith of high design of Wired's past, and its bold use of color, but still make it more inviting and less elitist," Perry said. "We are trying not to frustrate the reader."

Although Wired is suffering more than any other magazine in the Conde Nast stable, that's probably because it had such a dependence on technology advertisers -- and those advertisers brought it to such heights in 1999.

Now, "We're not rocketing out of the recession by any stretch, but I see a lot of positive signs," said Publisher Drew Schutte, who runs the business side. "I think we hit bottom in the February issue. Things have gotten progressively better since then."

Wired remains based in San Francisco, although its corporate parent since 1998 has been Conde Nast, the New York magazine arm of Advance Publications, a large media company privately owned by the Newhouse family. Wired's average circulation for the past six months of 2001 stands at 515,000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Anderson is only the third editor in the magazine's history, succeeding Rossetto and Heron. (Coincidentally, Anderson said, all live in Berkeley and send their children to the same school.) Those are tough acts to follow.

Wired an Award Finalist

In Anderson's favor, Wired is a finalist for a coveted National Magazine Award for general excellence this year among magazines with circulations of 500,000 to 1 million, to be announced May 1. Competitors include the New Yorker, Gourmet, Jane and Vibe. Under Rossetto, Wired won the award in 1994 and 1997.

The issues that put it in the finals were from February 2001, which Heron edited, and September and December 2001, which Anderson edited.

Anderson, 40, spent the past seven years at the Economist, a magazine whose design is almost the antithesis of Wired's. The Economist has no bylines, no splashy graphics and no-nonsense writing.

But, Anderson said, it shares a lot of "intellectual DNA" with Wired. "Both believe in free markets and free minds," he said. "Both have a libertarian world view. Both are analytical, opinionated and forward looking. Both are known for good writing."

Anderson speaks reverently of Wired's past. He said that it was a tremendous influence on him while he was at the Economist and that he is in touch with the husband-and-wife founders, Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe. "I just love them. I'm such a fan," he said. "They're a joy to talk to, and so supportive."

Like a seasoned Wired acolyte, Anderson gushes about technology. And, showing the sunny streak and contrarian view that characterizes much of Wired's writing on the future, he does not believe that the so-called new economy was a myth.

"I believe there is a new economy," he said. "I don't define it as Nasdaq 15,000. I don't define it as the end of the business cycle. It isn't the abandoning of laws. It just means that tomorrow's economy is very different from today's."

As for the magazine: "It's a credit to everyone who came before me that Wired did not succumb to the excesses of (the dot-com) era," he said. "Wired was both prescient and right about all the important things, and I'm here to build on that tradition."