Comments on: How to Read Wired Revisited

By: Jessica S.

Jessica S. — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:41:39 +0000

While I don’t love tons of ads, polybags, or blow-ins myself, I do understand that their presence allows me to continue receiving my favorite publications at a fairly cheap cost. With the cost of paper and postal rates increasing coupled with lower readership, magazines have to depend heavily on their advertising pages to sustain them and keep their stand prices low enough so you’ll still purchase. Worst case scenario: Your favorite magazine without all that ad revenue, could go defunct.

By: sue

sue — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:44:32 +0000

Vanity fair has sadly gone the same way as wired, the high profile issues might be bigger every year. But the amount of content has dropped :/
and i am the girl whose has a collection of every issue dating back to 97

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:39:09 +0000

I’ve been a subscriber for about 5 or 6 years now. For 10 bucks a year, its a steal and so much cheaper than buying issues off the newstands. I have to agree with most comments and say that wired back in the late 90s/early 2000s was a pretty awesome read. Unique content, great features, really wrote about the stuff I wanted to read about. However, I’ve noticed that recently a new wired takes me about a day or two to read through when a wired from back then took me a week or two to devour and I would constantly revisit and reread the articles. still worth 10 bucks a year though, no doubt.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:29:26 +0000

What we really need is an article titled “How to read Suck Magazine cover to cover. What a nice world that would be to live in.

By: Eric Siry

Eric Siry — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:48:53 +0000

Full disclosure: I worked at Wired for many years, in the design department.

To expand on what Ron said above, choosing the December issue is hardly a proper comparison, since December issues of many magazines are crammed with gift guides. But also, magazine ad pages are cyclical from year to year: November and December are usually flush with ads, while August and February are sparse. So the most accurate comparison would be to compare the September 1995 issue with the September 2007 issue. That’s how ad pages are compared when determining whether a magazine is doing better or worse.

Also, Dean, I don’t know whether Jason Kottke came up with the phrase “deboning,” but I first read it in 1996 in Wired’s Jargon Watch, attributed to someone else:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/jargon_watch.html

–Eric

By: Brian Dear

Brian Dear — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:24:44 +0000

I also chop out all of the double-sided ad pages, with glee. I do this for each new issue of FORTUNE, BusinessWeek, WIRED, The Economist, The New Yorker, and Portfolio.
I tear out “Special Advertising Section”s with particular glee.

Then I remove all of the business reply cards stuffed among the pages.

THEN I read the magazine.

By: Geoffrey Long

Geoffrey Long — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:25:07 +0000

You want to see a magazine where that deboning process has jawdropping results? Tackle an issue of Vanity Fair, which often packs dozens of pages of ads between two pages of its *table of contents*, for crying out loud. Talk about commercialism slitting the throat of usability!

One of the downsides of resolving to spend less and save more in 2008: it sort of sands down the top couple of layers of one’s advertising shield. When you’re not thinking about it, you can flip through magazines without paying much attention to these product-centric fluff pieces like Wish List, but when you *are*, then all of sudden it’s hard not to drop to your knees screaming “PLEASE STOP TRYING TO SELL ME SOMETHING!” Seriously. It’s enough to drive a man back to novels!

By: ron

ron — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 17:56:38 +0000

not to really defend wired, but that issue, including the picture with the tools, was part of a gift giving/product guide feature so using it as an example is somewhat unfair. and a subscription only costs 5 bucks from PCH so who really cares if its a bunch of ads.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 04:36:44 +0000

…the Wired movie constant: Whenever a movie is featured on the cover of Wired, it will suck, bomb, or both.

That’s hardly a constant, if only because it’s completely subjective whether a movie “sucks” or not. Sure, you could argue that ‘King Kong’ bombed (13.10) or that ‘Matrix Reloaded’ (11.05) really did suck, but what about Pixar’s ‘The Incredibles’ (12.06)? It was a blockbuster hit but also a critic’s favorite. Was ‘Lord of the Rings’ (9.10) a suck-bomb? That makes no sense.

By: Kiyoshi Martinez

Kiyoshi Martinez — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:20:22 +0000

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I honestly don’t mind the ads in WIRED. Sure, the first half of the magazine is “oh, wow, I wish I could afford that” but their design isn’t half bad and it makes for decent reading during lunch breaks, etc.

I might one of the few that’s more likely to read their long form articles in the magazine than online.