Wired (magazine)

Wired is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in publication since its launch in January 1993. Its editorial office is based in San Francisco, California, with its business headquarters located in New York City.

Wired quickly became recognized as the voice of the emerging digital economy and culture and a pace setter in print design and web design. From 1998 until 2006, the magazine and its website, Wired.com, experienced separate ownership before being fully consolidated under Condé Nast in 2006. It has won multiple National Magazine Awards and has been credited with shaping discourse around the digital revolution. The magazine also coined the term crowdsourcing, as well as its annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards.

Wired has launched several international editions, including Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan, Wired Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Wired Germany. The magazine was published monthly until 2024, when it switched to a bi-monthly schedule with six issues per year.

The magazine was launched in 1993 by American expatriates Louis Rossetto with his life partner and business partner Jane Metcalfe. Wired was originally conceived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, when they were working on Electric Word, a small, groundbreaking technology magazine that developed a global following because of its focus not just on hardware and software, but the people, companies, and ideas that were part of what they called the language industries. Whole Earth Review called it "The Least Boring Computer Magazine in the World". This broader focus on the social, economic, and political issues surrounding technology became the core of the Wired editorial approach.

Initial funding for Wired was provided by Eckart Wintzen, a Dutch entrepreneur. His Origin software company extended a contract for advertising and bought the first 1000 subscribers. Rossetto and Metcalfe moved back to the United States to start Wired, finding the European Union not a cohesive enough media market to support a continent-wide publication.

Origin's upfront payment was the seed capital which saw Rossetto and Metcalfe through 12 fruitless months of fundraising. They approached established computer and lifestyle publishers, as well as venture capitalists, and met constant rejection. The Wired business concept was a radical departure. Computer magazines carried no lifestyle advertising, and lifestyle magazines carried no computer advertising. And Wired's target audience of "Digital Visionaries" was unknown.

Wired's fundraising breakthrough came when they showed a prototype to Nicholas Negroponte, founder and head of the MIT Media Lab at the February 1992 TED Conference, which Richard Saul Wurman comped them to attend. Negroponte agreed to become the first investor in Wired, but even before he could write his check, software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson deposited the first investor money in the Wired account a few weeks later. Negroponte was to become a regular columnist for six years (through 1998), wrote the book Being Digital, and later founded One Laptop per Child.

By September 1992, Wired had rented loft space in the SoMa district of San Francisco off South Park and hired its first employees. As Editor and CEO, Rossetto oversaw content and business strategy, and Metcalfe, as President and COO, oversaw advertising, circulation, finance, and company operations. Kevin Kelly was executive editor, John Plunkett creative director, and John Battelle managing editor. John Plunkett's wife and partner, Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr) later became the launch creative director of Wired's website Hotwired. They were to remain with Wired through the first six years of publication, 1993–98.