Wired for Success

Story by Hudson Lockett

Sometimes the best medicine is hard to swallow.

“Journalism is either distinctive or it’s dead,” Wired’s Jacob Young told students Tuesday afternoon in the Texas Union.

Young, managing editor of the successful tech magazine, came to the University of Texas to deliver the School of Journalism’s Carnegie Distinguished Lecture. Held in the Union’s Eastwood room, the event was meant to give attendees an idea of what it takes to be successful in the rapidly changing field of journalism.

For those in attendance, the lecture provided a number of new ideas to consider.

“I think it was a pretty accurate description of what makes a successful modern-day news organization,” journalism and geological sciences major Anthony Wild said. Wild attended the lecture as part of his Covering Technology and Information class at the School of Journalism.

“His lecture made me grateful for taking all of the multimedia classes that, as a print journalism major, I didn’t have to take,” Wild said.

Young stressed above all the need to be distinctive, citing his experiences working for People magazine launching two spin off publications: Teen People and People en Español.

Young said Teen People was successful at first, but soon lost its edge when other magazines started up similar spin offs. The final nail in the coffin, he said, was the meteoric rise of Myspace.com. Young said the social networking site “absolutely decimated” Teen People with its capacity for immersion and interaction.

Meanwhile, People en Español was thriving. The magazine had started out with a relatively small staff and decent circulation, but unlike Teen People, its demographic wasn’t co-opted. Delivering content not available anywhere else, the magazine’s numbers rose to a circulation of 500,000. In contrast, Teen People is now out of print.

Young stressed that aspiring journalists also needed to work toward specializing in a category outside their major.

Young noted the variety of backgrounds represented by Wired’s editorial staff, which included a number of scientists and one former hacker. By focusing on more than just journalism, Young said students could offer something more than the competition.

“I do think that it’s really important to have some depth of interest,” he said, pointing out the degree of specialization in Wired as a significant factor of its success with its readers.

Wired subscribers tend to be more affluent males, while its Internet audience is somewhat younger and has a larger female component, Young said. In both cases, the specialized content was a driving force in bringing in readers. The setup is not foolproof, though.

The debut of gadget blog Gizmodo.com forced Wired to drastically change its publishing policy. The “get there first” nature of the Gizmodo forced Wired to publish reviews on its own site as soon as they were finished instead than holding off until the magazine’s monthly publication date.

While Young said he believed Wired had regained much of the group it initially lost to Gizmodo, the competition forced the magazine to rethink how and when it delivered content.

In keeping with this sentiment, virtually all of the content available in Wired’s print edition is now also available online.

Young also covered the need for agility, “seeing where you can take technology,” and the importance of staying connected with readers. Online communities organize around a specific idea, place or event, and journalists needed to figure out ways to categorize and create communities, Young said.

To this end, Young noted the need for editors to distill the ever-increasing amount of content springing up on the web and to moderate the communities that specialized coverage creates. Wired.com, for instance, had a higher rate of new hiring opportunities than its magazine counterpart.

As the lecture came to a close Young stressed once again the importance of being distinctive- offering something more than just one in a number of nearly identical write ups of the same story. “Not a commodity,” he said, “but something really special.”

Wired is currently offering four internships for “just graduated” students at its San Francisco office. The internships are full-time, and will run from January 7, 2008 to June 27, 2008. The deadline for applications is November 21. Click here for more information.