Wired

1How Kevin Kelly and the founders edited Wired

• Wired's founders made the magazine they wanted to read themselves. Kevin Kelly says the audience was the founders, building a magazine that did not exist yet, with total control and nobody to ask permission from.

  Play was part of it: Louis Rossetto wanted Marshall McLuhan on the masthead, and Kelly named him patron saint, partly as a joke since McLuhan was very Catholic and Kelly had never read him. "Fun was definitely part of the mix."

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• Wired told writers to amaze the editor and write up to readers. Kelly told writers they were writing to him, that he was bored by most of what he read, and that they had to surprise him. If a piece mentioned DNA, it did not need to explain it.

  He set this against newspaper tech writers trained to target an 11th grader, and aimed slightly above readers, explaining enough but not everything. Editors also hired for enthusiasm over polish. "Tell me something that I have no idea about in a way that I'm going to find surprising."

  How I Write▶ 10:25

• Editors imagined the best covers first, then commissioned stories to fit. Headlines and covers were the hardest part at Wired, so Kelly proposed working backwards: picture the best possible covers, check each was possible and had evidence, then assign the article.

  This generated story ideas and assignments, and applied to both commissioned pieces and writers' own pitches. "Let's start with the covers and the headlines. And then make the article back."

  How I Write▶ 28:42

• About 95 percent of editing talks with writers were about structure. Kelly found a magazine editor's main job is structure, and nearly all his feedback to Wired writers concerned it rather than phrasing.

  Good structure goes unnoticed; readers only see it when there is a jump, a logical hole or confusion. For anything complicated he recommends an outside reader. "You want the structure to be so graceful, intuitive, that you don't notice it."

  How I Write▶ 54:20

• Wired assigned writers to follow frontiers before they went mainstream. After Kelly's 1994 book Out of Control included a chapter on encrypted digital money, he assigned Steven Levy at Wired to follow the topic, and Levy went on to write a whole book on it.

  Kelly picks subjects by an editorial nose for what is new but important, with signs like new language and other people freaking out. Wired also created the click-through banner ad.

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