Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 24, 1993 TAG: 9309220307
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID PLOTNIKOFF KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After many screw-ups, late-night pizzas and rounds of venture capital, the Word and the Box made their way into the global village together. And only after many years did the people of the village come to understand that the Word and the Box were not one. The Box came with six cables and a bunch of cruddy software nobody used. But the Word came with promises of power and destiny.
Now - 26 years after McLuhan declared the medium to be the message - the Word isn't theory. It's reality: Everything plugs into everything.
It's a bright new day out on the digital superhighway, where the worlds of personal computing, communications and entertainment merge. And for those who have the skill and the desire to drive in the fast lane, there is Wired. The 8-month-old San Francisco magazine is the thrill-seeker's guide to a new frontier that includes everything from simulated sex to interactive rock 'n' roll.
Calling Wired a computer magazine would be like calling National Geographic a car-and-boat digest. The folks at Wired don't seem to particularly care what box you rode in on. They'd much rather wax theoretical about where you're going and how you plan to get there.
There are two ways to get to Wired itself. The easy way is to drive in electronically, through a computer network such as America Online or Prodigy. The other way is to park your car on Second Street, ring the buzzer, go through the deserted cement-floor lobby and climb the wooden stairs until you come to the chain-link fence on the third floor. Inside the fence, in a brick-walled warehouse loft, is the de facto map room for the new digital road. Think of the ``21 Jump Street'' set without the fat guy and you won't be far from the mark - mismatched office furniture, lots of interesting visual clutter and a staff of shiny, happy people so young the ink may still be wet on their art-school diplomas. There are no engineers.
The magazine's logo - an espresso cup - is an apt one. The energy in the office is about as subtle as the fluorescent-pumpkin lettering that explodes off the magazine's covers. The mellow Sade disc playing in the background is probably a concession to the old folks in the office - those over 30. The '80s model for young-master-of-the-universe was a corporate financier with a shiny BMW and pair of cast-iron wingtips designed for kicking boardroom butt. The '90s model is a Wired reader armed with a scooter, a Powerbook and a positive outlook.
At 44, founder and publisher Louis Rossetto is Wired's most-senior citizen. Talk with him for more than a few minutes and you'll begin to suspect the operation is deeply rooted in the teachings of another generation's cultural chieftains: McLuhan, Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner. A chat with Rossetto is one part sermon to two parts pregame pep talk. In terms of digital technology catching up to the vision thing, not only are we in the pregame mode, but the goal posts haven't been set up yet and people are still filing into the stands. This does not particularly trouble Rossetto. He knows who the players are going to be, and he is dead-sure we're in for one heck of a show:
``We're going through a real revolution that's only different from previous revolutions in that there aren't people shooting in the streets,'' he says, settling into a chair in Wired's tiny meeting room. ``The upheaval of social order is exactly the same. Everywhere you turn in our society there are profound changes going on, and we're trying to capture some of that excitement.
``Every period has a magazine that defines it. One that captures the spirit of the time. For a while it was Playboy, then Rolling Stone. They covered revolutions and wheeled their spotlights around and focused on new communities that were interesting and powerful.'' So how does he feel about the oft-heard comparisons of Wired to Rolling Stone or some of the splashier fashion mags? ``The two comparisons that I'm most comfortable with are Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Because no matter what they covered they showcased good writing. There is no other magazine like [Wired]. There's nobody doing what we're doing now. The computer magazines are about feeds and speeds, and we just take that as the background.''
Wired's hard-copy version (there's also a text-only edition through America Online) is like an MTV dreamscape - or nightmare - downloaded on thick semi-gloss paper. The graphics are as bright and busy as the Las Vegas Strip at night. The layout is jarring and non-linear - as if designers were cranked to the eyeballs on 110-volt espresso.
On the content side of the menu, there are five helpings of high-power intellectual nourishment for every one serving of gee-whiz-lookit-that-gadget eye-candy. The features range from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor talking about Jeffersonian democracy on the digital highway, to an article on interactive rocker Peter Gabriel's first CD-ROM, to a profile of futurist Arthur C. Clarke. Issue No. 4, due out Thursday, will feature an article by ``Jurassic Park'' author Michael Crichton.
There is a modicum of hard news in the magazine (as much as can be expected from a bimonthly) but the real good reads are the essays on interconnectivity, intellectual property, free speech in proprietary spaces, electronic privacy rights and education. Not the type of fare that can be digested in line at the checkout stand.
This isn't the first time publisher Rossetto and his partner, Wired president Jane Metcalfe, have tried to pry electronic culture away from its hardware-geek roots. They spent three years in The Netherlands working on Electric Word, a magazine that billed itself as ``the least boring computer magazine in the world.'' When that project folded in June 1990, Rossetto and Metcalfe returned to the United States and began designing the magazine they'd really wanted all along. At the time, media magazines were crashing like $49 disc drives, and Rossetto, who has a political science degree, a Columbia MBA and no technology background, found few people who wanted to pour money into a technology start-up.
Enter Nicholas Negroponte, the director of MIT's Media Lab and the spiritual leader of the digital revolution. Says Rossetto: ``He looked at our project, looked at us and said, `How much money do you need?' He realized everything he'd been talking about for the past 10 years - this coming together of computing, communications and the media - was actually transpiring right now. And we walked onto the stage at exactly the right time for him.''
Negroponte, who holds the title of senior columnist at Wired, was the first major investor. The second was Charlie Jackson, the San Diego entrepreneur behind Silicon Beach Software. Negroponte signed in April of '92. Jackson signed in June. By August they'd rented the loft and begun hiring the staff. Kevin Kelly, former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, came aboard as executive editor. John Plunkett, who did the signage for I.M. Pei's redesign on the Louvre, signed on as creative director. And by September, with all the big beans in the hopper, the espresso machine of magazine production began to grind.
Rossetto says the magazine is already ``nearly self-sustaining'' and struggling to adapt to a fast-track rate of growth. Between issues No. 1 and No. 2, ad pages jumped from 23 to 31. Now they're planning to shift from bimonthly to monthly with issue No. 5 in November. The magazine currently has 16,000 subscribers, 140,000 copies on newsstands, and tens of thousands of readers (they're not sure exactly how many) on-line. The promotions people at America Online compared Wired's debut to the opening of ``Jurassic Park.''
Rossetto estimates there are 3 million consumers who read computer magazines regularly, almost 4 million people who subscribe to the major on-line services and tens of millions of others who are interested in technology.
Rossetto wants Wired to speak to both the cutting-edge innovators and those just venturing onto the digital path. ``Our mission is to be inclusive, not to set up an elite kind of magazine that talks to an in-group. Initially, you have to talk to the in-group. Then they have to be the evangelist and draw in the larger audience.''
The issue of who will set the rules for the road ahead weighs heavily on Rossetto and his idealistic young staff. The idea that an oligarchy of giant corporations may take control of this virtual utopia is one he doesn't relish. ``We are preoccupied with power relationships. We're anti-authoritarian. Now I come back to my Stewart Brand-style optimism and say the potential is there for a more democratic society that allows a lot of different voices to be heard. A part of what we're saying here at Wired is it's OK to feel good about the future again.''
For information or a subscription to Wired, call (800) SO-WIRED, or write to WIRED, 544 Second St., San Francisco, Calif. 94107.
by CNB