Wired untroubled by its paradoxes

Irin Carmon of Women’s Wear Daily writes about Wired magazine‘s unique success as it celebrated its 15th anniversary last week.

Carmon writes, “Fifteen years in, Wired seems relatively untroubled by its paradoxes. The magazine purports to cover the future with a several-months lead time; it’s a print magazine that has outlasted boom and bust, as well as many of its competitors and an inherently fickle tech culture, but that until two years ago was orphaned from its online component, originally sold to Lycos. A mostly New York-based media corps repeatedly anoints it for print-oriented attributes like design, crafted apart in San Francisco. Its editor says he is not ‘a media person’ but he’s out there front and center offering answers to, among others, media people.

“All this comes at a time when even fashion’s elite embraces, at times reluctantly, what used to be the provenance of the geek. Or as Scott Brown put it in Wired’s May issue, ‘Our ethos has rewritten social DNA, which means (gulp) we’re in charge now. Let’s just say it: We won…. Nerds have exchanged uniqueness for ubiquity. It’s over. And uneasy lies the head that wears the horn-rims.’

“The alleged victory of the nerds, or the survival of Wired, was by no means preordained. Said former editor in chief Katrina Heron, ‘I do remember for a long time the demise of Wired being a regular prediction in the world of mainstream media.’ She added, ‘There was a certain kind of paternalistic media judgment being leveled….One of the things we’d always hear is, ‘It’s the green-haired kids on skateboards who read your book.’ But it was wonderful to be so sure that the idea was this big.'”

Read more here.