Of all the dot-com publishing franchises, Wired seemed the most likely to end up as road kill on a superhighway it helped create.
The seminal artifact of the Web 1.0, it was bought by Conde Nast Publications in 1998 and then lost two-thirds of its ad sales during the bust from 2000 to 2002. Its newsstand sales dropped by over a third in the same period, and its Web site was no help because, well, it didn’t even own its site.
Chris Anderson, then of The Economist, was dropped into the crater in 2001 as editor in chief. A few months into his tenure, he and I sat in a booth in the Conde Nast cafeteria as he earnestly explained that Wired was not a confection of the digital age, but a magazine about the culture to come.
PHOTO: AFP
“This isn’t the domain of techies anymore. It has gone mainstream in a way that doesn’t diminish its power, but illustrates it,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” I remember thinking.
He was right. Magazines like The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Business 2.0, eCompany Now all went down the digital drain, but Wired rowed carefully and slowly away from its geek origins and survived. (Fast Company, another magazine I suggested was toast, is managing a similar feat on a smaller level.)
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Wired had a very respectable 1,300 ad pages last year, and its ads are up slightly so far this year, an achievement in an era of secular and cyclical decline that is threatening all manner of old media. Newsstand sales are edging back to the boom years, and it didn’t hurt that along the way, Anderson penned a conceptual book, The Long Tail, that became the keystone for PowerPoints all over the land.
Perhaps most important, in 2006, the company reunited Wired.com and Wired magazine by buying the site from Lycos for US$25 million, a fraction of its US$83 million price back when Conde Nast bought the magazine in 1998. The traffic has tripled since the acquisition and the Wired brand, which once was perched on a very thin reed, is now a sturdy plank.
You might think that Conde Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square — where the September issue of Vogue is viewed as one of humankind’s crowning achievements — would be the last place to look for Web innovation. With its fat, luscious magazines and elevators full of thin, luscious people, it would seem to be the antithesis of the sneaker-wearing run-and-gun aesthetic of the Web.
After all, rather than run the risk of dulling the luster of the printed Vogue or Gourmet, the company produced Style.com and Epicurious.com, which took some content from the magazines, but kept the Web at arm’s length.
But there have been signs that the company is serious about constructing a digital business that is less beside the point. Soon after getting his hands on Wired.com, Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of the parent company, moved to buy Reddit.com, a social news site along the lines of Digg, although smaller.
Last week, all the attention was focused on the US$1.8 billion grab by US television network CBS for eyeballs with the purchase of CNet. But during the same week, Conde Nast bought Ars Technica, a small but very influential Web technology site; Webmonkey, a site for Web developers that will be restarted Monday; and Hot Wired, a storied brand from early Internet days — which ran the first banner ad ever. The price was not disclosed, but the company probably spent another US$25 million on the acquisition, according to executives there familiar with the deal.
Between the US$50 million already invested, and another US$50 million that may end up being spent on discreet, small acquisitions, Conde Nast has essentially re-geeked Wired. Much of the allure of the acquired sites is harvesting the bright young things who thought them up. But apart from all that the brain-collecting, executives at Conde Nast said that with the new properties at Wired Digital, the company will now have a male-skewing audience of about 19 million unique visitors, which will put them in the neighborhood of Forbes.com and the various Dow Jones Web sites.
Of course, every big media company is buying digital properties — in a grab either for audience or bragging rights. Conde Nast’s tack is different. It has a long history of financing impresarios and remaining patient, going back to Alexander Liberman, a Russian immigrant who arrived at the company in 1941 as a designer and became its protean editorial director. Tina Brown crossed an ocean to bring Vanity Fair back from the brink and then picked up The New Yorker and gave it a good tug. Anna Wintour, left to her own devices, turned Vogue into a behemoth, large enough to spin off Teen Vogue and Men’s Vogue, as well.
True to form, the captains of the Conde Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit — it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia — any more than they have told Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.
“We did not buy these sites to dictate what they should be doing,” said Newhouse, sitting in a borrowed office in the huge headquarters built by his father, Donald Newhouse, and his uncle, S.I. Newhouse. “There is a debate among big media companies about whether you achieve scale in digital businesses through big acquisitions, and all the cost and overhead that goes with it, or whether you do what we are doing, which is to lay the groundwork for a strategy that allows for real growth over time.” (He didn’t mention CNet, but he didn’t have to.)
David Carey, the group president with oversight over Portfolio, Wired, the company’s golf magazines and the ad sales at Wired Digital, would like to see a digital division that helps the company, which has always leaned on fashion-oriented print publications, make money off of a business audience as well.
“We have a great editor in Chris at Wired and a great team at Wired.com that has created a nicely profitable franchise in print and digital,” he said last Thursday. “We think we can scale that on the digital side through acquisition and growth into something meaningful.”
Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Conde Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — OK, he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Conde Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business.
“We didn’t have to take them on faith,” he said. “They have a track record of understanding what they acquire, which was alarmingly not the case with the other parties we talked to.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located