Magazines Will Never, Never, Never, Ever Change. I Run Wired, Trust Me.
April 2nd, 2008 | by Brad King |I worked at Wired magazine as an editorial assistant in 1999 and as a staff reporter at Wired News from 2000-2002. My love for that place, at one time, knew no bounds. Part of me still longs for the days of Katrina Heron and Alex Heard, who was one of the more interesting editors for whom I’ve ever worked.
But those days are gone. The new regime is run by an image-conscious blow hard who handles Wired as if technology never existed before he arrived. (But surely it must have since his big breakthrough, the idea of the long tail, was known by people who used the Internet for the previous thirty years).
Today’s brilliance: Anderson declares that in ten years, magazine will look and operate much as they do today. And he knows, because he is the editor of Wired:
“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”
Aaaaaarrrrgggggg.
To imagine that magazines will resemble their current iterations is to discount the fast-changing nature of technology adoption these days. It’s taken less than seven years for the music industry, television industry and movie industry to alter the ways in which they deliver goods.
Do movies and television look different? Sure they do. High-definition and digital recording have changed how the products look. And the delivery mechanisms — which is what the paper of a magazine is — is changing as well. TiVo, DVDs, BitTorrent, Hulu and others have absolutely changed how we receive those different media.
But surely we understand that emerging technologies and — more importantly — existing consumer electronics devices with added functionality will change the ways magazines look. We are past the tipping point of adopting new technologies.
