(continuation of a previous post)
If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time.
We launched Wired in January of 1993. It was an instant hit. Nine months later I was a married man. The wedding was also a hit, at least, that’s what I’ve been told. I wish I had taken notes during both these momentous occasions, but the truth is, my journals are mostly silent around both those dates. So again, my advice: pay attention. You might want to write about (or remember) these things someday.
September, 1992. Four months before Wired launched, I flew to New York to meet Wired’s President, Jane Metcalfe. After our interview, her partner Louis Rossetto offered me the job of Managing Editor – starting immediately. I was to fly back to San Francisco and start the process of taking Louis’ vision and turning it into a physical object: paper, ink, and journalism. There was one small hitch: I had told Michelle, the woman I was falling for, that I was going to move to New York to be with her.
Now I had another job to do: Convince Michelle to come back to California with me. I didn’t know if she’d agree. But I did know I wanted to join the band at Wired. It represented everything I wanted to do with my career.
I’d tried to start a magazine covering the digital revolution two years before, in grad school, but the truth was, I didn’t have the resources, experience, or the will to force it into the world. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism is a two-year program anchored by a Master’s Thesis focused on a topic of your choice. Documentary students make serious films, print journalists write serious, research intensive long-form features of 10,000 words or more. At the end of their first year, each student writes a short proposal outlining their idea and their plan for executing it over the following twelve months. Each project has to be approved by a Faculty sponsor, as well as the Dean.
My proposal was called something like “The Rolling Stone of Technology.” My plan was to create the first edition of a new magazine covering the impact of digital on …. everything. It was shot down immediately. I remember my Dean calling me into his office, sighing like a frustrated parent, and asking: “What do you know about starting a magazine?”
I did know a thing or two, or at least I thought I did. After college and before grad school I had worked at MacWeek, a startup publication covering Apple and the ecosystem that grew up around its Macintosh platform. Before I became a full time reporter there, I worked on the copy desk, which meant I had to master Quark, one of the first professional desktop publishing software packages. Quark was a revelation in the late 1980s – it replaced traditional approaches to design, layout, and production. I became a Quark wizard, and I had put those skills to work at Berkeley, publishing several student magazines in my first year there, including a special edition that collated a reporting trip a group of us took to Cuba, which at the time was closed to travel from US citizens.
This is probably as good a place as any to reflect on the early 1990s – a remarkable moment in the history of digital technology. The Internet – not the World Wide Web, but the foundation underpinning it – was two decades old, but only science fiction writers and a small but growing cadre of nerds understood its potential impact. Cell phones were the size of bricks, had less than one percent penetration in the market, and all they could do was…make a phone call. Only 15 percent of US households had a PC. That was enough to make PCs “normal,” but “WYSIWIG” graphical user interfaces – pioneered by Apple and copied by Microsoft with Windows – were just six years old. “Desktop publishing” – the practice of creating flyers, presentations, or full blown publications on a WYSIWIG computer platform – was less than four years old.
Thanks to a thousand miracles, including my stint at MacWeek, I happened to be at the center of it all.
So, I declared to my Dean with fragile bravado, I did know how to make a magazine!
“There’s a lot more to it than editing and production,” he retorted. “What do you know about the business? How are you going to pay for it?”
He had me there. Magazines must pay writers, editors, photographers, designers, sales people, printers, marketers, and distributors. All that business stuff had been handled by someone else at MacWeek. No one at the J-school knew how to run a business – much less pay for one. It’s one thing to write a long form piece or produce a decent student film. It’s quite another to presume you have the resources and know how to build an entire magazine or television outlet from scratch.
I accepted defeat. I wrote my thesis on the future impact of digital on traditional media, graduated into a miserable LA Times gig, quit, struggled to figure out my future, then got a call from Louis that changed my life.
***
Michelle said yes.
Well, yes…and. Yes, Michelle told me, she’d join me in San Francisco. And…she’d need a bit more of a commitment if she was going to leave everything – her job at CBS, her friends and family, and the love affair she had cultivated with the city of New York. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I got the message. If she was going to take a leap of faith, she wanted me to do the same. Fair enough.
I met Michelle in the Fall of 1991. I was nearly blind drunk in a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was researching the boring version of my thesis – the one that wasn’t “The Rolling Stone of Technology.” I traveled to New York with the goal of meeting as many people in the media business as I could. I was broke, so I stayed with a friend enduring his first year of training at Lehman Brothers. This training required that he work 16 hours straight, then drink himself into oblivion, preferably in the company of people who could “keep up.” On the night I met Michelle, he dragged me to Lucy’s Surf Bar, a cavernous, mostly empty establishment on Amsterdam. During the wee hours, Michelle strolled in, flanked by three admirers. When I left to visit the bathroom, she promptly stole my barstool.
Michelle was the kind of woman who turned heads – her co-workers nicknamed her The Face (CBS in the early 90s was not exactly concerned with sexual harassment lawsuits). She was the sharpest and most sophisticated woman I’d ever met. Effortlessly comfortable in the swirl of Manhattan, quick to laugh and quicker to anger, she was unswerving in her conviction that the stool she was sitting on was hers – despite the fact that it was right next to my stupefied friend, who at this point was too shitfaced to stand as a witness in my litigation of Michelle’s guilt.
I asked Michelle to prove the stool was hers. “I’m not a lawyer,” she shot back. “I’m a journalist.” It was around this time I realized I was speaking with the most attractive woman I’d ever met. “I’m a journalist too,” I responded like a fool, knowing full well I’d already lost the argument. “Where do you work?”
I got Michelle’s number under the guise of finding a source who worked in network television and might comment for my thesis. Our first date was lunch the next day, and it included a tour of CBS. I never found that source, but I proposed to Michelle one year after meeting her – and one month after starting at Wired. In those first four weeks at Wired I went from unemployed and single to gainfully employed and off the market. I found us an apartment on Washington St. on Nob Hill – right on the cable car tracks. Michelle came out in December, just as things were heating up at Wired HQ.
***
Those first few months were utterly bonkers.
I wasn’t home much. Since I was nearly living at the office, Michelle started coming in as well, and she ended up working with Jane, running communications and PR. We needed the help – we were hopelessly behind. Someone (Louis? Eugene?) had printed out a backwards countdown of the number of days till launch, affixing a thick stack of printer paper to the wall in the center of our bullpen. Each 8×11 sheet broadcasted a massive, foreboding number to us all.
By the time that stack was whittled down to “30,” I wasn’t sure we were going to hit our deadline. The printer needed final files by late December. We had timed our launch to the MacWorld Expo, a massive Apple trade conference that took place in San Francisco in early January. (That we chose MacWorld explains a lot about the state of tech in the early 90s – Apple may have only had ten percent of the overall market, but its customers represented by far the highest density of potential Wired readers on the planet.)
I created a tracking board for all the content that would fill our new magazine – eight long form pieces, dozens of short items for the front of the book, dozens more for the back. A back page column from Nicholas Negroponte. More than 50,000 words that needed to be assigned, contracted, submitted, edited, and designed. Never mind the ads that needed to be sold, the promotional campaign that needed to be launched, the newsstands that had to be convinced to carry our first edition. Louis handed out samurai headbands for the entire staff. I probably wore mine for longer than I should have.
No one had ever made a magazine with the ambition, bravado, and cost of Wired. Our designer John Plunkett was a soft-spoken man who had spent the last decade creating earnings reports for large corporations. He was used to large budgets, quality materials, and an exacting attention to detail. He almost always wore a kindly expression, but like all extraordinary designers, he was absolutely rigid in his vision. His fights with Louis were legendary, but Louis gave him license to get his freak on, and this he did with quiet zeal. Wired not only told a new story, it projected it through John’s groundbreaking design. Nothing about the physical artifact was conventional: The magazine’s dimensions, its fonts and colors, even its inks were entirely novel. John and Louis contracted with a high-end digital printer on the East Coast that could employ as many as 12 inks, instead of the conventional four. The result would be a neon explosion that jumped off the newsstand.
But if we were going to get onto that newsstand, we had to finish our first issue. My job was to deliver stories that screamed “Wired!” What did that mean? Well, you either got it, or you didn’t. That was our mantra. We didn’t want stories about speeds and feeds, we wanted stories about people, culture, and technology-fueled, radical change. But translating that into explicit instructions for writers – some half a world away – required an extraordinary amount of faith, a fair measure of self-delusion, and the ability to tell a convincing story about why anyone would want to write for a radically new magazine conjured out of pure imagination.
But the thrill! The thrill of working with a virtual community of luminaries who, for very little money, were composing the stories that would set Wired apart. There was John Markoff, from The New York Times, who we assigned a piece on hacker culture. Bruce Sterling, an acclaimed science fiction author who wrote our cover story on the future of war. Stewart Brand, who interviewed media theorist Camille Paglia on the impact of Wired’s “patron saint” Marshall McLuhan. A bonkers piece on Japanese culture from Karl Taro Greenfield. A portentous investigation into a government coverup involving murder, piracy, and data surveillance. Wired was far more than a magazine, it was a movement, and these writers were its vanguard. More than two dozen freelancers contributed to that first issue, and hundreds more joined us in the following months.
But the most important piece of writing in that first issue was the introduction – a mission statement authored by Louis that almost didn’t make it into print. About a week before our deadline, most of the pieces were in, and the magazine had taken shape. But I felt like something was missing. I emailed Louis (he had an office behind our bullpen, but we used email for just about everything). The magazine needs an explainer, I suggested. Something that lays out to the world why we’re different, what we stand for, the story we’re covering. An answer to the question: Why Wired, and why now?
Louis agreed, and responded – in email – with a hyperbolic manifesto so utterly Wired that it’s worth reprinting in its entirety. I still remember how I felt when I first read it: Holy shit. What kind of world will we be living in….if this turns out to be true?!
Here’s the text:
Why WIRED?
Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button.
And because the computer “press” is too busy churning out the latest PCInfoComputingCorporateWorld iteration of its ad sales formula cum parts catalog to discuss the meaning or context of social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.
There are a lot of magazines about technology. WIRED is not one of them. WIRED is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications, and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.
Our first instruction to our writers: Amaze us.
Our second: We know a lot about digital technology, and we are bored with it. Tell us something we’ve never heard before, in a way we’ve never seen before. If it challenges our assumptions, so much the better.
So why now, why WIRED? Because in the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context.
Or put another way, if you’re looking for the soul of our new society in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get WIRED.
That “digital generation” had yet to be born. But like zealots adhered to a new prophecy, we saw our mission as heralding their arrival. Looking back – more than three decades (and three children) later – well…it doesn’t feel like we were wrong.
***
Wired launched on January 2nd, 1993. When the boxes landed from the printer, the entire staff – now numbering around 18 – smuggled magazines into MacWorld (we weren’t an exhibitor, and union rules forbade distribution of media inside the hall). I remember us handing out copies at the top of the escalator in Moscone center, a gang of punch drunks advising perplexed attendees to “Get Wired!”
As we plied the halls of MacWorld, more than 100,000 copies of our first edition were on their way to newsstands around the country. We had no idea how our launch edition would perform – would people like it? Would they subscribe? Would we have enough support to make another issue?
About a week later, the answers came – first as a trickle, then as a torrent. If you’ve ever read a paper magazine, you’re familiar with the 3×5 inch cards that fall into your lap when you open an issue. These are “blow in” subscription cards – named after a machine that blows the cards into the pages of the magazine during the final stage of printing. Back when snail mail ruled the world, you’d save that card, fill out your name and address, check the “bill me” box, and drop it into the mail. Not many people actually went through this process – but those that did became a magazine’s most profitable customers.
One week after launch, hundreds of sub cards began to flood our offices each day. By mid January, we were drowning in them – thousands of real people who had gotten Wired, loved it, and were asking for more. By the end of January, we knew that Wired’s first release was a hit. Now we just had to make another one – and another – month after month, for as long as we could keep it up. For me, that was nearly five years. But why I left Wired, and what came next, is a story for another day.
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This post (and its predecessor) represents something of a departure for me – the result of a friend asking me “how did you end up at Wired, anyway?” Let me know what you think.