Weekend Reading: The Future Of Wired, Malcontents and Content

imageForget the discussion and the torrent of words everywhere about the future of newspapers and magazines. Instead, head over to Boing Boing Gadgets, and read the meme that started earlier this week about the future of a very specific brand, Wired magazine, how it has capitalized on the brand online over the years, and the future for the print and online versions going ahead.

The discussion was sparked by a decent story in theNYT‘s Monday edition about how even though the magazine’s readership has been doing very well (the revival, as it calls it, over the last five plus years), it hasn’t been able to weather the economic storm as well as might have been expected. Adding to the complexity of the debate: the disconnect between Wired the print edition and Wired News, the online site that does have big traffic, but has been waning in its influence over the years. (Conde Nast finally bought the online site back in July 2006).

And then, the biggest white elephant of all: Chris Anderson’s own personal brand, and how his books may (or may not) have implemented what he has preached through his seminal book “The Long Tail“, and his upcoming book “Free“.

Having grown up on, well, at least the second incarnation of Wired magazine, it is heartening to see attempts at trying to dissect what the brand meant over the years, and what lies ahead. Lots of high-quality comments from former and current writers at Wired, and Anderson as well. Worth reading in full, as the lessons from it are far more universal than apparent at first. Among them: the print and online integration, both on the editorial and business side; developing the online brand as a separate entity than print; the value of magazines fostering communities online; the future of long-form reporting vs online’s quest for story of this second; integrating blogs into a magazine/publishing site; magazine and the site collection of editors/writers/bloggers’ brands and how that can help build the publication’s brand; and even the future of a magazine company like Conde Nast.

Interesting how you can see parallels to the *Playboy* magazine-and-online situation, especially as the company is reportedly for sale now.

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