Wired Doesn’t Know Print Is Dead?

The winding down of the Condé Nast magazine empire is showing some strange thinking at Wired, which is supposed to be all about the future. Shouldn’t they being doubling down on the web as ad revenues in print are collapsing? But the company is laying off resources working on the web side.

[via Unwiring Wired by Ryan Tate]

But it’s not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the further reduction of Wired Digital comes as New York-based parent company Condé Nast clings to a magazine-centric business model that’s been a real disaster lately. After hiring McKinsey & Company’s consultants, Condé closed four magazines and slashed magazine budgets, by 25 percent at many titles. And while Wired Digital’s already-bled websites and blogs may have strong traffic, advertising and critical notice — they were recently nominated alongside the Washington Post, BBC and New York Times for the Online News Association’s general excellence award — they’ve been included in the cuts.

So how is Condé expecting to survive the next big tumble in magazine advertising, if not with its websites? Through the vision of print side editors like Wired’s Chris Anderson, who seems, to some Condé Nasties at least,to have spent so much time on books and speaking gigs he’s forgotten to help sell ads — or to try and truly integrate his magazine with his website? Anderson’s ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we’re reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, “Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me.” Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Maybe they are just clueless. Just because you write about others creating the future doesn’t mean you can do it for yourself.