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Wired Magazine)
Wired magazine is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. It reports on how technology and the Internet affect culture, the economy, and politics.
It is no longer related to Wired News, which publishes at Wired.com. However, Wired News is responsible for reprinting Wired magazine's content online due to a business agreement holdover from when Condé Nast purchased the magazine, but not the website.
Its editorial stance was partly 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.
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.
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.
For a magazine that was to become so closely identified with the Internet, famously there was not a mention of the Internet in the magazine's first issue, Wired 1.01. 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. After receiving some "constructive feedback" from readers, the Internet became one of Wired's major topics.
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 the first 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 boom.
In 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO. They had to withdraw it in the face of a downturn in the stock market, and especially the Internet sector, during the summer of 1996.
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 Magazine Publishers, who assigned it to Advance's subsidiary, New York-based publisher Condé Nast (while keeping Wired's editorial offices in San Francisco).
After the dot-com crash
After the crash of the dot-com boom, Wired lost much of its impact and had to compete with the multitude of technology reporting and sources available on the Internet. But having outlasted several other boom-time technology magazines, including The Industry Standard and the Red Herring, Wired is again growing under the direction of Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson.
In the past couple of years, Wired has produced some agenda-setting articles, including the April 2003 "Welcome to the Hydrogen Economy" story, the Nov. 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) and the February 2004 "Kiss Your Cubicle Goodbye" issue (which presented the outsourcing issue from both American and Indian perspectives).
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.
The March 2005 issue contains a detailed article about Wikipedia and its history. The article follows Wikipedia's conception and rapid growth as well as the challenges it faces.
Over the years, Wired's writers have included, among many others, Paulina Borsook , Paul Boutin, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Chip Bayers , Denise Caruso , Douglas Coupland, Joshua Davis, J. Bradford DeLong, Cory Doctorow, Esther Dyson, Mark Frauenfelder, Simson Garfinkel , William Gibson, George Gilder, Katie Hafner, John Heilemann , Xeni Jardin, Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Jon Katz, Lawrence Lessig, Jaron Lanier, Steven Levy, Pamela McCorduck , Oliver Morton, Adam Penenberg, Randall Rothenberg , Phil Patton , Spencer Reiss, Rudy Rucker, Joshua Quittner, Paul Saffo , Peter Schwartz, R. U. Sirius, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Gary Wolf .
References
- Gary Wolf (2003). Wired: A Romance. Random House, New York. ISBN 0375502904
External links