Wired wants to be a place for big tech ideas

Pete Vernon of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed new Wired editor Nicholas Thompson about the magazine and his plans.

Here is an excerpt:

When you talk about pushing Wired “off a cliff,” what does that look like? What changes do you want to bring in terms of design, content, and approach?

I don’t know where the cliff is, and I don’t know where we’re going to dive off of it. We’ll figure that out down the road, and it may be a series of smaller cliffs. At the moment, what we’re trying to do design-wise is a bunch of relatively small, relatively geeky things. We got rid of jump pages, we’re not going to have any more tiny fonts, and the philosophy of the covers will change. We’ve put bylines back on the index pages. That’s important to help people identify with writers, to identify those writers with Wired, and ultimately to help build a business model around that.

We also need to do a much better job of being a place for big ideas, possibly controversial, possibly crazy ideas. The core of Chris Anderson’s Wired [he was editor from 2001 to 2012] was a place for wild ideas about the way technology is changing the world. We need to bring that back.

Tech has become much more mainstream, so there’s nothing revolutionary about writing about Microsoft or Google. But even though those companies and those ideas are now at the core of our culture, there is an edge, and we need to find it.

Read more here.