Wired (magazine)

From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from founding editor and publisher Louis Rossetto. In 1991, Rossetto and founding creative director John Plunkett^[4] created a 12-page "Manifesto for a New Magazine,"^[5] nearly all of whose ideas were realized in the magazine's first several issues. During the five years of Rossetto’s editorship, Wired's colophon credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint." Wired went on to chronicle the evolution of digital technology and its impact on society.


Wired quickly became recognized as the voice of the emerging digital economy and culture^[6] and a pace setter in print design and web design.^[7][8] During its explosive growth in the mid-1990s, it articulated the values of a far-reaching "digital revolution" driven by the people creating and using digital technology and networks. It won the National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in its first year of publication, and others subsequently for both editorial and design.^[9][10] Adweek acknowledged Wired as its Magazine of the Decade in 2009.^[11]


From 1998 to 2006, Wired magazine and Wired News, which publishes at Wired.com, had separate owners. However, Wired News remained responsible for republishing Wired magazine's content online due to an agreement when Condé Nast purchased the magazine. In 2006, Condé Nast bought Wired News for $25 million, reuniting the magazine with its website.


Wired’s second editor Katrina Heron^[12] published Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” breaking with Wired’s optimism to present a dystopian view of the technological future.


Wired's third editor, Chris Anderson is known for popularizing the term "the long tail",^[13] as a phrase relating to a "power law"-type graph that helps to visualize the 2000s emergent new media business model. Anderson's article for Wired on this paradigm related to research on power law distribution models carried out by Clay Shirky, specifically in relation to bloggers. Anderson widened the definition of the term in capitals to describe a specific point of view relating to what he sees as an overlooked aspect of the traditional market space that has been opened up by new media.^[14] The magazine coined the term crowdsourcing,^[15] as well as its annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards, which recognize "products, videogames, and other nerdy tidbits pitched, promised and hyped, but never delivered."^[16] In these same years, the magazine also published the story, written by Joshuah Bearman, that became the movie Argo. In more recent times, the publication became known for its deep investigative reporting, including a long story about Facebook—"Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook and the World"—that became the publication's most read article of the modern era. It was written by Fred Vogelstein and Nicholas Thompson, the latter of whom was the publication's editor-in-chief and had also been the editor on the piece that became Argo.