Wired (magazine)

• 1. A Magazine Born in Amsterdam

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  Wired magazine launched on the 6th of January 1993, handed out by its founders at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Two American expatriates, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, had spent nearly five years building toward that moment. They had conceived the idea in Amsterdam, where they were running a small technology magazine called Electric Word. Whole Earth Review had described Electric Word as "The Least Boring Computer Magazine in the World." That praise pointed at what made their editorial instinct different: the focus was not on hardware and software, but on the people, companies, and ideas reshaping what Rossetto and Metcalfe called the language industries.

  The fundraising to make Wired real was a gauntlet. Rossetto and Metcalfe moved back to the United States and spent twelve fruitless months approaching computer publishers, lifestyle publishers, and venture capitalists. The concept was a radical departure: computer magazines carried no lifestyle advertising, and lifestyle magazines carried no computer advertising. Their target audience of "Digital Visionaries" was unknown to advertisers. Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen provided the seed capital; his Origin software company advertised in the magazine and bought the first 1,000 subscribers.

  The breakthrough came at the February 1992 TED Conference, which Richard Saul Wurman comped them to attend. Rossetto and Metcalfe showed a prototype to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte agreed to become the first investor, but software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson deposited the first investor money in the Wired account a few weeks before Negroponte's check arrived. Negroponte went on to write a regular column for six years, through 1998, and later founded One Laptop per Child.

  By September 1992, the team had rented loft space in San Francisco's SoMa district near South Park. Kevin Kelly became executive editor, John Plunkett creative director, and John Battelle managing editor. Copies distributed at Macworld arrived on newsstands two weeks later as Bill Clinton took office, with Vice President Al Gore touting the Information Superhighway.

• 2. The Voice of the Digital Revolution

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  Rossetto wrote in his launch editorial that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon." He wrote that when fewer than 10 million people were connected to the Internet worldwide, barely half that in the United States, and when smartphones and web browsers did not yet exist. The boldness was deliberate and characteristic.

  The first issue covered interactive games, cell-phone hacking, digital special effects, digital libraries, digital surveillance, and military simulations. An interview with Camille Paglia was conducted by contributing editor Stewart Brand. Bruce Sterling, who appeared on the first cover, wrote about military simulations. Karl Taro Greenfeld contributed a story on Japanese otaku. Wired was one of the first magazines to list the email addresses of its authors; the column by Negroponte was written in the style of an email but contained an obviously fake address, a detail corrected in the second issue.

  Advertising response was strong from the start. Associate publisher Kathleen Lyman joined from News Corporation and Ziff Davis with the specific mission of attracting both technology and lifestyle advertising. She and her colleague Simon Ferguson, Wired's first advertising manager, landed campaigns from Apple Computer, Intel, Sony, Calvin Klein, and Absolut in the debut issue. Circulation was strong enough that Wired moved from quarterly to bi-monthly with its next issue, then to monthly by September 1993 with a William Gibson cover story about Singapore titled "Disneyland with the Death Penalty," which was banned there.

  In April 1994, Wired won its first National Magazine Award for General Excellence, covering its first year of publication. During Rossetto's five years as editor, the magazine was nominated for General Excellence every year, won the design award in 1996, and took a second General Excellence in 1997. The New York Times wrote that "Wired is more than a successful magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the 60's, it has become the totem of a major cultural movement."

• 3. Hotwired and the Banner Ad

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  On the 27th of October 1994, twenty months after the first print issue, Wired Ventures launched Hotwired.com. It was the first website with original content and Fortune 500 advertising. The launch team invented the banner ad, bringing AT&T, Volvo, MCI, Club Med, and seven other companies to the web for the first time through websites built by Jonathan Nelson's Organic Online.

  Among the twelve people who launched Hotwired was Jonathan Steuer, who led the group; Justin Hall, a pioneer blogger who ran his own successful site alongside his Hotwired work; Howard Rheingold as executive editor; and Brian Behlendorf, co-creator of the Apache server, who served as webmaster. Barbara Kuhr, wife of creative director John Plunkett, became launch creative director of the site.

  By the end of 1995, Hotwired ranked sixth among all websites for revenue, ahead of ESPN, CNET, and CNN. Wired expanded the platform into a suite of vertical sites including Ask Dr. Weil, Rough Guides, extreme sports coverage, and cocktails content. In 1996, Wired introduced the search engine HotBot in partnership with Berkeley startup Inktomi. Wired hired forty engineers to write the code for its editorial and advertising software. By 1997, all the web properties were rebranded under Wired Digital, which by then contributed 30 percent of Wired Ventures' revenues. The unit was projected to reach 40 percent in 1998.

• 4. The Failed IPO and the Sale

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  In 1996, seeing rivals Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek go public, Wired Ventures announced its own IPO. Goldman Sachs and Robertson Stephens were selected as co-leads, with Goldman managing. The June IPO was postponed when the market declined. When the offering finally launched in October, Goldman could not close the round after another market downturn, and Wired withdrew.

  Observers claimed the market rejected Wired's $293 million valuation as too high for a traditional publishing company. Wired countered that private investors had put $12.5 million into the company in May at just under the original offering price. The Goldman executive who managed the deal said: "Had the market not been so volatile, I believe the offering would have been quite successful."

  The failure left Wired Ventures cash-strapped. Tudor Investment Corporation brought in Providence Equity Capital, and a private funding round closed at the end of December 1996. Wired cut costs by shutting its UK magazine, its book publishing division HardWired, and its television operation. By June 1997, the print magazine was profitable. Wired Digital's share of revenues grew from 7 percent in 1996 to 30 percent in 1997.

  Rossetto and Metcalfe lost control of Wired Ventures in March 1998. Providence and Tudor hired Lazard Freres to sell the company. They agreed to sell the magazine to Miller Publishing for $77 million. When Conde Nast learned of the deal through a leak to a Silicon Valley gossip columnist, it outbid Miller and bought Wired magazine for $90 million. Conde Nast declined to purchase Wired Digital; four months later, Providence and Tudor sold that unit to Lycos. Early investors and founders threatened lawsuits over the distribution of proceeds, claiming unfair allocation of $50-100 million. The deal ultimately closed in June 1999 for $285 million. The combined proceeds of both sales exceeded the valuation Wired Ventures had sought at the time of its failed IPO.

• 5. Reunification and Later Decades

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  Rossetto's penultimate issue as editor appeared in January 1998, five years after his first. He titled it "Change is Good," Wired's unofficial slogan. His final issue, in February 1998, carried a complete redesign of the magazine. Katrina Heron became Wired's second editor-in-chief starting with the March 1998 issue.

  Conde Nast kept the editorial offices in San Francisco after the acquisition but moved the business offices to New York. The magazine survived the dot-com bubble under publisher Drew Schutte, who expanded the brand through ventures like The Wired Store and Wired NextFest, an annual festival of innovative products and technologies that ran from 2004 to 2008. In 2001, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson steered coverage toward a more mainstream audience.

  In 2006, Conde Nast repurchased Wired Digital from Lycos, reuniting the print and web brands under one owner after eight years of separation. In 2009, Conde Nast launched an Italian edition and relaunched the UK edition under editor David Rowan. In 2018, Wired hosted a twenty-fifth anniversary event that included Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey, and many other founders of the technology industry.

  In August 2023, Katie Drummond became the new editor of Wired. During the second presidency of Donald Trump in 2025, Wired broke numerous stories about the Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk criticized the magazine publicly; Drummond responded: "If you still don't understand why Wired covers politics, you are either willfully ignorant or a complete idiot." In April 2026, the magazine announced that its Italian print edition will cease publication. The magazine that began as a quarterly in 1993 had by then switched to a bi-monthly schedule of six issues per year.

• 6. Coined Terms and Global Reach

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  Wired contributed at least two lasting coinages to technology culture. The magazine coined the term crowdsourcing, and established the annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards. Both emerged from an editorial culture that positioned the magazine as a commentator on tech industry behavior as much as a chronicler of it.

  Wired has launched international editions in the United Kingdom, Japan, Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Germany. The German edition was originally set to be headquartered in Berlin, negotiated through a deal with Gruner and Jahr in 1996. The Japanese edition was licensed to Dohosha Publishing, also in 1996. The UK edition, initially launched as a joint venture with the Guardian newspaper and later shut during the 1996-97 cost-cutting, was relaunched in 2009. The Italian edition, launched in 2009 by Conde Nast Italia, announced in April 2026 that its print version will close.

  The contributor list across the magazine's decades includes writers such as Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Levy, Cory Doctorow, and Jaron Lanier. Guest editors have ranged from filmmaker James Cameron and director Christopher Nolan to former president Barack Obama and tennis player Serena Williams. Nicholas Negroponte, whose investment helped make the magazine possible, wrote his column through 1998 and his book Being Digital emerged from that regular engagement with the publication.