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Wired magazine is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line publication published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. It reports on digital technology and culture,
examining how they affect mainstream culture and politics. 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 and heavy use of color.
The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and
his partner Jane Metcalfe in
1993 with initial backing from 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 was quickly followed by a companion
website, HotWired, a book publishing division, Hardwired, and a short-lived British edition, Wired UK. In June 1998, the
magazine even launched its own stock index, The Wired Index, since July 2003 called The Wired 40.
In May 1998, the founders' company, Wired Ventures, sold Wired to Advance Magazine Publishers, to be published by
Advance's subsidiary, New York-based publisher Condé Nast (while still making the magazine in
San Francisco). The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded closely to that of the dot-com boom. In late 1999 and 2000, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures twice tried to
take the company public with an IPO, but had to
withdraw owing to a lack of interest within the investment community. Rossetto was eventually forced out in 2000. Since the crash of the dot-com boom, Wired
lost much of its impact and has had to compete with the multitude of technology reporting and sources available on the
Internet.
Over the years, Wired's writers have included, among many others, Pamela Borsook, Po Bronson, Chip Bayers, Denise Caruso, Douglas Coupland, Simson Garfinkel, George Gilder, Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Lawrence Lessig, Pamela McCorduck, Randall Rothenberg, Phil Patton Schrage, Neal Stephenson,
Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and Gary
Wolf.
References
- Gary Wolf (2003). Wired: A Romance. Random House, New York. ISBN 0375502904
External links
- Wired.com , shared between Wired Magazine (owned by Condé Nast Publications)
and Wired
Digital (owned by Terra Lycos, Inc. )
- HotWired companion website to Wired Magazine
- The Wired 40 stock index homepage with pointers to related
Wired articles
- Deconstructing Wired , an article assessing the magazine's style and
target demographic
- Wired UK: what
nearly happened , an article on the rise
and fall of Wired UK
- Rewired, The English Ideology and WIRED Magazine
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