What would radical transparency mean for Wired? (Part 1)

One of the best things about 2006 was getting our website back so we could practice what we preach--now I bang on and on about "walking the talk". Turns out that between preaching and practice, preaching is by far the easier. The past six months have been consumed by porting 14 years of stories to a modern content management system, redesigning the site and submitting request tickets to an overworked engineering team. We have a pretty clear vision of what a magazine website in 2007 could be, but we've still got a long way to go. We're shooting for a February relaunch but it's already clear that some of the features we're most excited about will slip to later in the year. This happens. 

In the meantime, we brainstorm. It's been a fascinating exercise to think really broadly about what a media company today should be. We don't know (and neither does anyone else) but what's clear is that the landscape and reader expectations have changed dramatically since the mid-90s, when wired.com was first taking shape:

THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers go next. Portals rule.

NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. "De-portalization" rules.

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THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.

NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.

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THEN: Readers read HTML in a standard web browser window. If you want to be really fancy, design a whole new Flash interface that people will have to learn to get to your content. Charge for "premium content"? Sure!

NOW: More and more people read via RSS, where content is divorced from context. Media is atomized and microchunked. Even if readers do come to your site, the expectation is that the presentation will be a mix of HTML, AJAX, Flash multimedia and embedded third-party apps. Screens range from high-resolution wide displays to handhelds. Whatever you do, don't let your design interfere with web conventions--everything must be Google-crawlable and blogger permalinkable. Oh, and everything must be open and free.

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THEN: We control the site. Editors are gatekeepers.

NOW: We share control with readers. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much "out there" as on our own site.  

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So there you have it, a motto for media in an age when consumers are in control:

"Catalyze and Curate"

In the next post, I'll talk about how that might work. 

Comments

[Ian Betteridge]

"NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. "De-portalization" rules."

So Digg isn't popular? Yahoo isn't the most popular destination on the web?

Portals are just editorial decisions: destinations that select sites and stories that you might be interested in. That isn't going away, at all. What is changing is how those editorial decisions are made. They can be made by one person, anywhere, and we call that a blog. They can be made by aggregating lots of individual choices, and we call that social software. They can be made by computer algorithm, and we call that Search. Or they can be made by advertising-funded publishing companies, and we call that mainstream media.

The point is that all of these devices fulfill the function that we've traditionally ascribed to "portals". All of them make a stab at choosing the information that you're likely to be interested in, and presenting it to you. And, if you want something to be read, you still have to ensure that it's picked up by these "microportals". Just putting it on a web page and hoping Google will index it won't work.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I've yearned or the day when Start and Info Porn were online.

Many thanks!

[Piers Fawkes]

I'd suggest that your web presence no longer has to be contrained by your site anymore. Wired content and application could be spread across the web in a curated way too - widgets are the simplest way to understand this.

[Eric]

Simple question:

Are you guys planning on changing your RSS feeds so that you syndicate whole articles (as you do for this blog here), rather than just headline + summary?

Because I'll level with you; I'm a lot less likely to read an article when I have to open a new window vs when it's just there in Google Reader.

[Chris Anderson]

Eric,

We're planning to set a relatively generous target of 400-500 words for the RSS excerpt (for most of the content, that's the whole thing). The limit isn't because we're trying to drive traffic to the site (we actually hope you'll come to read the comments and otherwise participate in the debate) but becuase anything longer than that can be annoying in a feed reader.

Chris

[Elliot Feldman]

Here's my problem with the latest version of WIRED (print version). I liken it to the early Harvey Kurtzman-edited MAD Magazine versus the seventies Albert Feldstein-edited MAD Magazine. (Yeah, I'm an old guy. Get over it.) The Kurtzman version of MAD was created as an act of love for an audience who "got it." Each frame in every satirical comic was packed with overt and hidden jokes. The reader could go back numerous times to the same comic and find something new. The Feldstein-edited MAD was dumbed down for a broader audience, all covert jokes removed along with Kurtzman, Will Elder, and most of the original MAD artist geniuses (save Don Martin). For me, original WIRED had the same type of genius where the pith would often be found in the margins. Present WIRED is dumbed down for a broader audience like seventies MAD Magazine, so it's no wonder that WIRED has lost its significance.

[Howard Rheingold]

A few people who were there will recall that

"We're not going to become the bozofilter for the Web" is what Louis told me when I proposed "share control with readers. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much "out there" as on our own site" in 1994.

[gregory]

"media" implies a mediated experiece, as opposed to a direct experience, and "new media" seems to be simply a flow directly skin to the direct experience we seemingly used to have with our senses.... it has become immediate again, and this is the charm of the current times.... so, you are no longer a media worker or content provider, but simply a sharer of living, which was always the beauty of community, grounded in love.

[dfc]

GROUPS-BEta GROUPS-BEta GROUPS-BEta GROUPS-BEta