July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Wired magazine has replaced its longtime website editor-in-chief, Evan Hansen, with a Wired magazine veteran, Mark McClusky.

The change is a signal of how rapidly the magazine is shifting to an integrated print and digital model. Ironically for such a forward-facing publication, Wired is a relative latecomer to this approach.

The move happened today, announced via roughly simultaneous tweets from Hansen and McClusky.

So long @wired it's been fun.—
Evan Hansen (@evanatwired) February 04, 2013

Hansen followed up with a tweet saying he thought McClusky was a great choice and wishing the best to Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dadich: “@markmcc great call to lead http://wired.com to new heights @wired @sdadich – best.”

Both Hansen and McClusky are my friends, so I’m going out on a limb a bit in reporting on the story. I worked at Wired.com from 2007 to 2011, where Hansen was my boss, and I worked alongside McClusky years ago at a startup magazine called Mobile (formerly Mobile PC).

The move signals that this is the latest step in Wired owner Condé Nast’s consolidation of the brand. Wired long suffered from its split into two entities, print and digital. When Conde Nast acquired the magazine from its founders, Louis and Jane Rossetto, in the late 1990s, it left the website on the table. Wired.com eventually went to Lycos and then, after a change of ownership or two, wound up being sold to Condé Nast in 2006 for a rumored $10 million to $20 million. However, Wired.com remained in a separate division of Conde Nast for years. The parent company remained focused on print magazines until quite recently, and it seemed content to let its websites languish with minimal budgets and minimal oversight.

In recent years, Condé Nast has gradually brought the two sides of the business together, at Wired and at other magazines it publishes.

Wired.com brought in almost as much revenue as Wired magazine in Q4 2012, so Condé Nast execs probably figured it was too important to leave under separate leadership any longer.

According to a WWD report, Dadich began looking for a replacement for Hansen within weeks of his own appointment as EIC in November, but it took awhile to execute because Hansen reported directly to Condé Nast president Bob Sauerberg.

Hansen led Wired.com for eight years, steering it safely through some of the site’s highest and lowest points.

“When the journalistic stakes were highest, @evanatwired made the right call every single time. He’ll be missed,” Wired reporter and Danger Room cofounder Noah Schachtman said on Twitter.

“End of an era and a good, long run. Saved #wired.com and totally transformed it. Good job. F**cking good job!” tweeted Leander Kahney, through his Cult of Mac twitter handle.

However, Hansen wasn’t well liked within Condé Nast. By contrast, Dadich, a designer who has been described as “a cross between Jesus and Pelé,” made a strong reputation at Condé by helping lead the creation of Wired’s first iPad app. He then cemented that reputation by going to New York and becoming the company’s iPad chief, helping all of Condé’s magazines with their tablet editions.

Sources I talked to were optimistic about the change and didn’t expect any other immediate shuffling of the staff.

Couldn't possibly be more proud or excited to be named the new editor of Wired.com. Now, the fun starts.—
Mark McClusky (@markmcc) February 04, 2013

Top image: Wired.com’s 2012 anti-SOPA protest.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people consume content, as well as the way writers and editors create it. Today, Contextly has emerged from stealth mode to change the way digital journalists provide context in their stories.

Contextly was founded by Ryan Singel, a veteran journalist who cofounded the Threat Level blog at Wired. After a decade as a writer and editor, Singel is leaving to run Contextly full time. The guiding principal behind the company is the belief that context is everything, and the tools available to reporters are inadequate.

Contextly offers a plugin for WordPress that makes it easier for writers to include related links. Right now, connecting to other articles involves search engine queries, multiple tabs, and copying and pasting. These steps make telling a full story more time-consuming and frustrating than it should be. However, telling the full story is necessary not only to engage readers, but also to relay the news with as much truth and value as possible.

“Readers crave context in news, even as a reporter’s job of putting the day’s story into a larger picture is hard to do when speed is essential and the news cycle never stops.” Singel said in a blog post announcing his departure. “But writers — good ones — know that the day’s work is just part of a long-­term story that they and their co­workers have been telling for years.”

Online journalism has been descried as a step down from print publications, where information had to be verified by two credible sources and every article was fact-checked. However, one of the benefits of consuming news online is that readers can track down the truth for themselves and find background information and alternative perspectives. It also puts a massive store of knowledge at the disposal of reporters who can use it to inform their writing.

“Writers like related links because they make them feel like they are not just putting out yet another story that feeds the Internet beast, but that they are telling a larger story,” Singel said during an interview with VentureBeat. Those links are more important than people give them credit for. If you are reading something in a newspaper, it is not easy to go find out more information. Links can help readers discover new content, learn more about topics that interest them, and verify original sources.”

While building Contextly, Singel approached the design from an editorial perspective. He said writers have a deep institutional knowledge and need an efficient way to express it and tell a more connected tale. The widget “marries editorial control with serendipity,” and according to early beta testing on Wired, Contextly increases page views, as well as time-on-site. 

There is also a data analytics component. The engine gathers data on site visitors and produces readable reports that writers and publishers can use to inform their work. Use cases range from large online publications like Wired to individual bloggers to companies that are using their blogs to engage customers. As with any form of digital media, more traffic means more revenue.

“There is so much going on in online journalism,” Singel said. “There is so much experimentation and so much demand on writers. What we are hoping to do is make writers’ and publishers’ lives easier and more profitable, as well as explore fun new things. The online journalism world hasn’t totally figured out what the business model is and what readers want, and hopefully we will play a good part in figuring that out.”

Down the road, Contextly will release a series of other tools for digital publishing, but right now, Singel and his team are focused on related links. Monday will be Singel’s first day as a full-time entrepreneur in over 10 years, and while he expressed sadness about stepping out of the daily news cycle, he said he’s looking forward to the journey ahead. Read his full blog post here.

Mat Honan, a senior writer for Wired magazine, became the poster child for victims of hacking earlier this month when he wrote about how intruders broke into his Google, Twitter, and iCloud accounts. The hackers used the latter to remotely erase all of the data on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. In a matter of an hour, he said, “My entire digital life was destroyed.”

Honan had been relying on a cloud service to house all of his data, with no secure backup system. But not all was lost. DriveSavers Data Recovery says it was able to salvage Honan’s most precious data through its secure data recovery process.

“It was a big story when he lost it,” said Chris Bross, a data recovery engineer at DriveSavers in Novato, Calif. “I wondered if we were going to get involved.”

Leo LaPorte, a longtime tech writer and broadcaster, and an Apple Store employee referred Honan to DriveSavers. The company focused on the MacBook Air for recovery. The data on the iPhone and iPad was encrypted by default, and so it was not recoverable. When the remote wipe is done on those devices, the relevant encryption key information was lost and so it was unrecoverable.

The MacBook Air has NAND Flash memory instead of a hard disk drive for permanent memory. That device was also remotely wiped, but that only affected 25 percent of the solid state drive (SSD). It did not completely finish the job because it was interrupted, perhaps because Honan disconnected it.

“He interrupted that process from completing and that was super-critical,” Bross said. “That was great timing.”

DriveSavers was able to extract the SSD from the computer and recover the data. At first, the company uses a method to copy the contents of the drive to its own secure disk. They then worked off the copy of the disk. The directory information was lost, so DriveSavers had to decipher the raw digital data on the drive. About 25 percent of the data was a bunch of zeroes. That was gone for good. But then they saw actual numbers coming through on their scan.

Honan said he had recovered all of his tens of thousands of photos.

“I nearly cried,” Honan wrote.

He was able to examine all of the data. Huge video files were intact and perfectly usable. He lost his applications, but he said he will be able to recover those.

Honan, of course, now backs up his data with physical copies.

The fee for the DriveSavers service is based on how large the media is and what data is recovered. It’s zero if DriveSavers fails to get back any of the desired data. Honan said he paid $1,690.

[Photo credit: Wired]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Condé Nast, the publisher behind GQ and Wired magazines, is close to a deal to begin selling its magazine issues on the iPad for $2 each and will offer yearly subscriptions for $20, a source familiar with the matter told the New York Post.

The publisher will begin releasing versions of its New Yorker magazine first with coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death to generate some additional buzz for its iPad magazines. The iPad editions are expected sometime next week, according to the New York Post. It also means the costs of Condé Nast’s current iPad publications will fall considerably — its Wired app currently costs around $4 per issue, and its GQ app costs $5 per issue.

The iPad also offers a few extra bells and whistles for magazine publishers that want to add some interactive content to each publication. Publishers can include videos, high-resolution pictures that readers can zoom into and interactive menus and games to further enhance that content. But all of that inevitably drives up the price of the publication because it requires more manpower and technical know-how — specifically, how to program an app on an iPad — that publishers did not need before the advent of the iPad and other tablet computers.

Whether those new price tags will be sustainable is another story altogether. Condé Nast will open its content up to a massive audience — Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads since the tablet computer was released. But the costs of producing the content might not be met with revenue from the publisher’s iPad app.

A lot of publishers have turned to the iPad as the next evolution of print magazine-style publishing, but none of them has really knocked it out of the park just yet. The iPad versions of each magazine usually have steep price tags — at least, when compared to other apps on the Apple App Store. The new price tags would drastically undercut that — which is the shelf price for each normal magazine — but would open the content up to more casual readers.

Hearst, another magazine publisher, also said it will begin selling iPad versions of its Popular Mechanics and Esquire magazines, which will come out in July. Time has also announced that it will release iPad versions of its Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Time magazine issues for free to print magazine subscribers.

Kelly’s assessment gives us a window into what’s important now and what will happen in technology in the future. Here’s what he described:

1. Screening. (Meaning to make a lot of use of screens). Kelly said that screens are proliferating into every part of our lives. A couple of decades ago, everyone thought that the web would be like TV, with 500 channels. But now the screens in our lives are taking the web everywhere, to the screen in Starbucks, smartphones, tablets, the living room, the workplace, etc. The question is, could one screen rule us all? Whoever makes that screen will turn out to be mega rich.

2. Interacting. Like actor Tom Cruise manipulating images with his hands on a holographic computer in Minority Report, we are now interacting with content all over the web. And when we interact, the web responds by adapting to our behavior. It’s possible for web apps to measure our every move when we’re using them and then report detailed analytics to their developers. Those developers can then take that feedback and adapt their apps to better suit us. This feedback loop is making web apps better and better. It’s as if they’re reading our emotions and are becoming two-way windows, Kelly said.

3. Sharing. Kelly said that everything that can be shared will be shared. We are just at the beginning of this movement, which has been instigated by Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. People can now measure and track just about everything in their lives in a kind of “quantified self” movement, Kelly said. In turn, they are taking that data and sharing it widely. The expectation is that by sharing our data, we can learn from it and benefit from it. Sharing can thus enhance the value of whatever we share.

Kelly said that we are now sharing things we never thought we would, like information about our friends, locations, investments, health, memories, expectations and activities. Privacy is a concern, but most people don’t mind sharing this information in the right context.

“Part of the adventure now is to imagine things that are not being shared now and how they can be shared,” Kelly said. (No, I’m not sharing what I ate for lunch.)

4. Flowing. Kelly said this verb is akin to the word “streaming.” The metaphor for the original personal computers was the desktop. In the web, the metaphor changed to the page, as in web page. Now, the right metaphor is flowing, or streaming, like streaming movies. We click on a movie site and expect the movie to start streaming to our screen in real time. Streams are everywhere now, on all of those screens in the screening trend. We can watch movies, listen to music, play games, and participate in conversations by tapping into these streams on the web.

5. Accessing. We used to own everything, like movie disks or computer game disks. Now, if we are surrounded by streams, we don’t care if we own them. We can rent them instead. On Netflix, you don’t need to purchase a movie. You can just pay to access it when you need it. With books, you won’t collect a library; you’ll download what you want five seconds before you read it on your Amazon Kindle eBook reader.

Music will likely go the same way, Kelly said. If you can access your collection from anywhere by logging into the cloud, you won’t need to own it. Kelly noted that all of the music on the planet can now fit on one 6-terabyte hard disk drive in a computer you can buy for $585. But there is no reason to carry it around.

6. Generating. These days, anything digital that can be copied will be copied. So the goal is to make something that can’t be copied. If users generate their own content, personalize it, or customize it, then they’re creating something of value. Focusing on that is where you can be successful. Musicians have had the problem of digital piracy for years and it has wiped out the old music industry. But musicians are making more money than they ever had by charging for live concerts, an experience that can’t be duplicated so easy.

How do you make money on the modern web? Kelly said he doesn’t know. But he believes that wherever the attention flows, the money will follow.

According to the New York Times, Conde Nast will officially announce the plans in an internal memorandum today. The publisher likely won’t be alone in dishing iPad plans over the next few weeks — Apple expects to ship the Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad in late March, and the 3G-equipped version in late April.

Conde Nast already has a presence on the iPhone via its GQ app, which according to the NYT  “has sold more than 15,000 copies of the January issue and almost 7,000 of the December issue.”

Because of the uncertainties still surrounding tablet magazines with consumers, the publisher will be testing different prices, advertising models, and methods of digitizing its magazines. While Wired’s tablet version was developed in conjunction with Adobe, Conde Nast will be handling digitization of its other mags internally. As expected, the tablet magazines will be sold through iTunes. Wired will also be available outside of iTunes, so it will likely be available for upcoming Android and other tablet devices.

Conde Nast appears to be approaching its digitization efforts with these magazines as a test phase. If the publisher is pleased with how these magazines perform, it will look towards digitizing other magazines in the fall.