A non-conventional editor at Wired

Joe Pompeo of Capital New York profiles new Wired editor Scott Dadich, a former designer trying to bring the rest of Conde Nast into the 21st century.

Pompeo writes, “Dadich, however, won’t agree that there’s anything strange in a long-time designer and digital business enthusiast becoming the editor-in-chief of a marquee magazine.

”Creative directors and designers are very much editors,’ he said, a few hours after the Fashion Week event. He was lounging cross-legged on a black leather sofa in the 19th-floor office of Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who was out that afternoon. Wired publicist Jonathan Hammond was there, seated to his left. On a coffee table in front of them were three small bottles of Poland Spring and three carefully arranged copies of the magazine’s hot-off-the-presses March issue, the first with Dadich’s name at the top of the masthead since he was installed following long-time editor Chris Anderson’s resignation last November.

“‘We read stories in the same way that a traditional editor would read them, looking for tone, for voice, for structure,’ Dadich went on. ‘I’ve always been afforded a seat at the editorial table.’

“It’s not as though Si Newhouse and his lieutenants have always been predictable in their choice of editors for big titles. Back in 1984, who would have thought that the precocious British editor of the very English society magazine Tatler, a young woman named Tina Brown, was on Newhouse’s list of people to revive Vanity Fair? And while Remnick today seems like a natural in The New Yorker’s top slot, at the time when he was elevated from a staff-writing position in 1998 to succeed Brown, who’d jumped from Vanity Fair six years earlier, he’d never actually served as an editor. Nor were Dadich’s predecessors at Wired conventional magazine guys. (Anderson, after all, is leaving to run his robotics company full-time.)”

Read more here.