Wired magazine is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. It reports on how technology and the Internet affect culture, the economy, 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 with its bold use use of fluorescent and metallic inks.

The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe in 1993 with initial backing from software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and 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 won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design in its first four years.

The magazine was quickly followed by a companion website HotWired , a book publishing division HardWired, a Japanese edition, and a short-lived British edition, Wired UK. HotWired itself spawned dozens of websites including Webmonkey, the search engine Hotbot, and the first weblog Suck.com. In June 1998, the magazine even launched its own stock index, The Wired Index, since July 2003 called The Wired 40.

The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded closely to that of the dot-com boom. In 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO. They had to withdraw it in the face of a downturn in the stock market, and especially the Internet sector, during the summer of 1996.

Rossetto and Metcalfe lost control of Wired Ventures to financial investors Providence Equity in May 1998, who quickly sold off the company in pieces. Wired was purchased by Advance Magazine Publishers, who assigned it to Advance's subsidiary, New York-based publisher Condé Nast (while keeping Wireds editorial offices in San Francisco).

After the crash of the dot-com boom, Wired lost much of its impact and had to compete with the multitude of technology reporting and sources available on the Internet. But having outlasted several other boom-time technology magazines, such as The Industry Standard and the Red Herring, it is now growing again under the editorial direction of editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

In the past couple of years, Wired has produced some agenda-setting articles, including the April 2003 "Welcome to the Hydrogen Economy" story (which helped frame the whole alternative energy conversation before Bush invaded Iraq), the Nov. 2003 "Open Source Everywhere" issue (which put Linus Torvalds on the cover and articulated the idea that the open-source method was taking off outside of software) and the February 2004 "Kiss Your Cubicle Goodbye" issue (which presented the outsourcing issue from both American and Indian perspectives).

The November 2004 issue of Wired was published with The Wired CD. All of the songs on the CD were released under various Creative Commons licenses, an attempt to push alternative copyright into the spotlight. Most of the songs were contributed by major artists, including the Beastie Boys, My Morning Jacket, Paul Westerberg, David Byrne, and Le Tigre.

Over the years, Wired's writers have included, among many others, Paulina Borsook , Paul Boutin , Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Chip Bayers , Denise Caruso , Douglas Coupland, Cory Doctorow, Joshua Davis, Esther Dyson, Mark Frauenfelder, Simson Garfinkel , William Gibson, George Gilder, Katie Hafner, John Heilemann , Xeni Jardin, Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Jon Katz, Lawrence Lessig, Jaron Lanier, Steven Levy, Pamela McCorduck , Oliver Morton, Adam Penenberg, Randall Rothenberg , Phil Patton , Spencer Reiss, Rudy Rucker, Joshua Quittner , Paul Saffo , Peter Schwartz, R. U. Sirius, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Gary Wolf .

References

• Gary Wolf (2003). Wired: A Romance. Random House, New York. ISBN 0375502904

External links

• Wired Digital websites http://hotwired.wired.com/home/
  • Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/ shared between Wired Magazine (owned by Condé Nast Publications) and Wired Digital http://hotwired.wired.com/home/digital/ (owned by Terra Lycos, Inc. http://www.terralycos.com/ )
    • The Wired 40 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/wired40/ stock index homepage with pointers to related Wired articles
  • Hotwired http://hotwired.wired.com/
  • Hotbot http://www.hotbot.com/Default.asp
  • Webmonkey http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/
  • Wired News Animation Express http://www.wired.com/animation/
  • HardWired http://hotwired.wired.com/hardwired/
• Deconstructing Wired http://www.zooid.org/%7Evid/txt/decon_wired.html , an article assessing the magazine's style and target demographic
• Wired UK: what nearly happened http://www.spesh.com/danny/wireduk/ , an article on the rise and fall of Wired UK
• Rewired, The English Ideology and WIRED Magazine http://www.rewired.com/96/Fall/1118.html
• Japanese edition of Wired http://www.asyl.co.jp/works_en/wired/covers/wired.html
• The short-lived Wired UK http://www.perfect.co.uk/2004/10/the-wired-uk-manifesto-october-1996
• Suck http://www.suck.com/daily/1995/12/22/
• Early backer Charlie Jackson http://www.angelicentertainment.com/jackson.htm