Blowing things up at Wired

Emma Bazilian of Adweek talked to new Wired editor Scott Dadich about the tech magazine and his penchant for design.

Here is an excerpt:

In your first editor’s letter, you said that you were planning to “blow some stuff up” at Wired. What did you mean?
This is a place that really thrives on change, progress and transformation. That means that we get to experiment, talk about the future and live those changes as they happen.

You’re known as Condé Nast’s iPad guy. Does print still have an important place in magazine publishing?
Absolutely. Magazines are an enduring form of media, whether they’re on paper or pixels. I liken it to a movie: We can watch a movie on our phone, we can stream it through Netflix, we can go to the theater, it can be in 3-D, but at the end of the day, it’s still a movie. We look at magazines in a similar context. The substrate may change, but the fundamental notion of a collection of thoughts and ideas that’s well designed and carefully curated is something that’s built to last.

Steve Jobs actually showed the cover of Wired’s iPad edition during his iPhone 4 unveiling. What was that like?
That was an extraordinarily gratifying experience. Steve is a personal hero of mine. We had gone to Apple in the summer of 2009 and shown my vision demo to a group of executives, and I know that it had gotten up to Steve at one point. The fact that we were working on [a tablet edition] a good while before Apple had even introduced the iPad publicly was amazing.

Read more here.