Scott Dadich of Wired Magazine

Here are my notes on the presentation by Scott Dadich, creative director at Wired Magazine, at the Editors Forum in San Francisco. Our senior editor Lori Shontz filled in some gaps in my notes, and if any of you remember additional things from Dadich's presentation, please add them in the Comments. Thanks!

Dadich came to Wired from Texas Monthly magazine. He's the current president of the Society of Publication Designers.

Early on, he showed a photo of his art department and it had probably 20 people in it!

He talked about the rigorous process that goes into developing a cover. For their "Rocket Boom" cover (issue 15.06, sometime in 2007; http://www.wired.com/wired/issue/15-06) Dadich had an idea about rockets blasting off from a field. He had been watching Terminator 3 and Battlestar Galactica, so he was thinking of those styles. They went to New Mexico and got some photos at White Sands National Monument, I think, then hired something like four different illustrators just to try some ideas for the rockets shooting up from the sands. They ended up not using any of the ideas!

(Compare that to our magazines, where we hire one illustrator and we go with what they give us—I got the sense that Wired will hire illustrators just to give them material get their thinking started.)

Ultimately they went with an agency that does computer-generated images. (Side note: Dadich says that most of the photos you see of cars in magazine ads are not photos, but computer-generated renderings.)

They fussed over things as detailed as the types of propulsion systems—what color the “exhaust” coming out of the rockets would be, depending on the kind of fuel. There's a huge amount of editorial direction, retouching, etc. going on. Scott said that their process for the cover is pretty much this rigorous every time.

Obviously, none of us has the staff or money to do what Wired does (and I wish one of us had thought to ask Dadich how the economic downturn has affected their ability to spend this kind of money). But still it was fascinating to get a look at their process.

I was struck by how unbelievably creative they are. It seems like they’re always thinking, “What if we did this?” Some examples:

    —For the cover of a “how to” issue, they got Martha Stewart to pose as if she were baking a cake in the shape of a Nintendo Wii (issue 15.08, sometime in 2007; http://www.wired.com/wired/issue/15-08).

    —They did a piece called “Operation Christmas” (December 2007) in which they posed the question, What if Santa Claus were real? And had to deliver a present to every Christian child in the world in one night? What would be the logistical and geopolitical challenges he would need to overcome? The intro to the story says: “Santa oversees a massive network of container ships, naughty/nice surveillance, and special-ops helpers trained for covert entry into homes.”

NPR did a piece on this: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1755840

    —They also did a chart tracking the cup size and body-mass index of Playboy centerfolds against the average American woman over time.

    —They did a photo essay on classic instruction manuals (I think from the Smithsonian), from the Gemini space capsule to a nuclear power plant (issue 16.11, http://www.wired.com/culture/design/multimedia/2008/10/ff_manuals)

They just have such creative minds.

Because they're a newsstand magazine, they have the ability to know which covers are popular and which ones aren't. They know which covers sell 75,000 copies on the newsstand and which ones sell 100,000. Three best-selling covers over the past year have been:

    —“Evil Genius” (Apple computer logo with chains)

    —“Attention Environmentalists” (Screw the spotted owl cover, which was their top-seller … all text and neon colors)

    —“Why Things Suck”  (Sarah Silverman on the cover). On this one, they purposely screwed up the registration on the spine—another example of how much details matter.

They just did a cover on GPS technology (February 2009), and it did not sell well at all. He thinks because it wasn’t cutting-edge enough for their readers. A week or so later, he saw an almost identical cover on a telecom magazine from Greece—a direct ripoff of the Wired cover. 

A cover they did on Bill Gates’ replacement, Ray Ozzie (Jan. 2008), also sold very poorly.

There’s an adage in the business that “cancer is death on the newsstand,” but Wired’s cancer cover (Jan. 2009) sold very well. It was “a really smart story,” he says.

They recently did a Wall Street/economics cover (March 2009) that sold surprisingly well. The cover was very stark: black and white, which is unusual for them.

You can see their covers at http://www.wired.com/wired/coverbrowser/.

They know their covers right now through December of this year. (Jeff Lott leaned over at this point and said to me, “That would be like me knowing my covers through 2012.” Me too!)

He talked a lot about typography. His favorite typographers are Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, who designed such fonts as Interstate (used on road signs all over the country), Gotham (used in the Obama campaign), and others.

Dadich worked with Hoefler to develop a custom typeface for Wired called Vitesse. It has “horizontal lines that keep your eye moving through the word.” They also designed a sister font called Forza, and one called Exchange. Exchange is vaguely similar to Times Roman, but with a slightly larger x-height and a significantly larger cap height; it allows them to get 1190 words on a page instead of 1150.

So they don’t buy fonts off the rack; instead they spend big money to develop their own custom fonts. I'm guessing a lot of big-time commercial magazines do this. Dadich said: “We have a wide variety of content; we needed a range of fonts to reflect that.”

These fonts were designed to be part of Wired’s branding—“a variety of typefaces that feel very ‘Wired.’”

Then they have what he calls “sprinkle fonts” that they use here and there throughout the magazine. (That's my favorite new phrase from the conference: "sprinkle fonts.")

Some miscellaneous other notes from his session:

They did a cool (and gross) story on a lab in Seattle that’s slicing and mapping human brains (issue 17.04, April 2009 I think; http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_brainatlas).

Lately they've done some feature where the opener is more than just the first spread. They did a story on Jim Gray, the guy who went out to sea, off the California coast, to scatter his mother’s ashes—and was never seen again … Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were involved in the search for him (issue 17.04, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-08/ff_jimgray). That story had a four-page opener, i.e., two full spreads before you actually got to the body copy.

Another story called “Screw Organic” had a 10-page opener! (I think this was issue 16.06, July 2008.)

During the Q&A, someone asked him for his take on the future of print, and he quoted someone (James somebody; does anyone remember his last name?) as saying that magazines might go the way of the horse. That is, they would become a bit of a luxury—only wealthy people would have them, but they would certainly still exist.

He said, If you just want information, the internet is better. But if you want a cinematic experience, or to tell a story, it’s better in print. That's why (1) storytelling and (2) design matter so much in magazines today.

That's also why Wired spends so much time on things like 10-page openers, if they think it’s interesting/cool/worth it, and why they pay so much attention to little details, like the folios. For example, in a story having something to do with fuel efficiency in cars, the page numbers were rendered as tiny odometers.Their readers love the cute little things the magazine does with its folios, and even write them letters about that.

Someone asked if he minded that readers might not notice a little thing like the page-number-as-an-odometer the first time they look at it, and he said no. He actually prefers that they notice it the second or third time they look at it. "We engineer for multiple readings.” It adds value, and makes you hold onto the magazine longer.

—Tina Hay, The Penn Stater magazine

Thinking Beyond the Obvious

Presenter: Paula Brewer Byron, editor, Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin

When she started at Harvard, Byron had an esteemed alum call and say “Young lady, don’t change the Bulletin. The Bulletin is like Shakespeare and the Bible.” She followed this for a couple of issues, but soon redesigned, and even kept her job. (So there's hope for the rest of us)

-Refuse to let your magazine be limited by other people’s assumptions and expectations. Example: Portland magazine (Annie Dillard called Portland "the finest spiritual magazine in the United States.")

-Write your slogan. This is NOT your mission statement. Helps define your publication and align with your readers. This doesn’t have to be stated in your magazine – it can just remind you of what your ideal content is. (Real Simple: Life made easier. Men’s Health: Tons of useful stuff.)

• Bulletin’s slogan: Telling doctors’ stories.
• California: Ideas from the leading edge

-Aim for things that point. Special reports that focus a portion of the magazine on a theme. Look for unexpected juxtapositions (eg Bulletin article “The Seven Deadly Sins of Medicine”)

Invite your readers—and writers—to play
Don’t underestimate the value of humor in building loyalty in your readers. The New Yorker says 98% of its readers turn to the cartoons first, and the other 2% lie about it. The Bulletin did a fashion issue. Article “The Proctologist Wears Prada.” Balance it with serious so you don’t lose your job.

Covering the Campaign

Presenter: David Gibson, Communications Director for Development, Dartmouth

-Lesson #1: Dartmouth has a communications director specifically for fundraising. Amazing!

-Communication between editors and fundraisers is key. You all have the same goals – to advance the interests of the institution, demonstrate its relevancy and engage your audiences.

-Write a communications plan WITH your fundraisers. Develop story ideas based on that.

-Part of that conversation with fundraisers should be educating them about what a magazine does well (tells a story, puts your institution in context) and what it does poorly (asks people for something)

-Fundraisers know better than anyone that there is a time and place to ask for money. There’s a process of bringing them closer to the issues you’re raising money for and a respect for the potential donor.

-The magazine is widely read and credible for a reason – don’t ruin it by asking for money.

-Potential donors are investors. Content is critical in their decision to invest in the university. Magazines can serve as a prospectus for them to tell them what they need to know about you.

-Doing a story just based on its merits can be a huge fundraising tool, even if it doesn’t directly ask for money.

Yes, You Are Judged by Your Cover

Presenters: Matt Jennings, Middlebury Magazine, Middlebury College; Jason Treat, Art Director, The Atlantic

Conversations about magazine covers. Great follow-up to the keynote from Wired creative director Scott Dadich.

Lesson #1: Every magazine editor thinks other editors get to do whatever they want! But really, every publication has limitations.

You can’t assume that just because you’re the magazine of someone’s alma mater, they’re going to give it even a second of attention. As Tina Hay says, readers are fundamentally disinclined to care about what’s in your magazine. You have to MAKE them care.

If you have an administrator who is nervous about provocative content, ask  “Well what makes YOU open a magazine?”

Your readers were challenged and provoked and surprised in the classroom and during their time at your institution, so shouldn’t your magazine do the same thing?

Matt Jennings tip: Offer a truly ridiculous idea first (Hey, why don't we get this couple to reenact that John and Yoko cover!) and then your real idea won’t sound so scary.

A good cover should:
-Surprise
-Provoke
-Pique

We remember and talk about provocative magazine covers decades later (Think Esquire cover with Mohammed Ali pierced by arrows)

Opening Session: When Science Becomes Your Beat

Speaker: Sue Halpern, Author, Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines on Memory Research. Scholar in residence, Middlebury College

Haplern was a science writer at Columbia, and was required to go on rounds. (“As a voyeur, I mean reporter.”) She soon learned the hallway discussions were more interesting and revealing than being in a patient's room.

She came to see a patient’s history as its own story, with beginning, middle, drama, heroes and villains.
There’s something really simple that most of us don’t think about: there are stories everywhere, waiting to be told, even in science. Of course you wouldn’t necessarily know that by the way science is taught. It is often alienating. It’s taught in a way that is stripped of narrative, and based on memorization and facts, and it ruins science for most people.

Science is really about the QUEST for facts, not just the facts. Science has movement and characters.

2 of 5 of Halpern’s books are about science – both are narrative. In "Four Wings and a Prayer," Halpern follows “monarch butterfly groupies” who are obsessed with monarch butterflies. Halpern was interested in monarch migration, but wrote the story of the people who follow the butterflies. The science is woven in and serves the story. In turn, the story serves the science.

Science has an inherent story built into it, we just have to find it.

Gerry Marzorati on the future of long-form narrative

The following was New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati's keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors' Forum.

I watch what people read. Everywhere I go. Obsessively. Furtively.  Seeing what they are reading, I pass judgments quickly and with confidence. I establish imaginary relationships:  I used to get crushes on women who were reading Proust, or Baudelaire, or a recent issue of French Vogue. I am not impressed by men who carry big Lincoln biographies onto planes.  I’m afraid of people who spend too long with a page of Dostoevsky.  A young person immersed in a volume of poetry give me hope. I would trust leaving my children with anyone who can fold a broadsheet newspaper properly.

One afternoon last September I was on a long line to order lunch at this little health-food takeout place next to the old Times Building on 43rd Street.  A guy in front of me – early 20s, tall, hip -- was intently reading his Blackberry, holding it up to his face,  his nose nearly pressed against  it.  I watched what he was reading, or strained to -- a Blackberry has no cover  or front-page or other tip-off  to what the text might be. It was more than a message he was reading – I could see that. It was long, and he was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. As we both got to the counter, I sort of  sidled to his left,  making like I was checking out the day’s soups, and it was then I  got a clear glimpse of what he’d been engrossed in:  It was that week’s cover story of my magazine.  And about what he was reading – was doing – I  have yet to come to any clear judgment, though I do have this feeling that I better.

The Art of the Interview

Presenter: Dale Keiger

Dale’s been interviewing and writing for 36 years and figures he’s had between 1,800 and 2,000 stories published … so the man’s done a lot of interviews. Here are a few tips on The Art of the Interview from the Dale:

• Contrary to popular advice, an interview is NOT a conversation. “If your interview is a conversation,” he says, “you’re talking to much. Your job is not to talk. It’s to listen.”

• A good interview is NOT a seduction. The definition of seduction is progress toward a preconceived end. You’re not going to learn new or surprising things this way. You want to let the interview take its own direction.

• A good interview gets you the answers to questions you had not thought to ask before you started.

• Listen.

• A request for an explanation does not make the interviewer sound unintelligent or ill-prepared, it reveals a deep curiosity, and in turn, gets the subject to talk more. A lack of preparation—not knowledge—reveals a lack of interest.

• And speaking of preparation … You must prep and research, and it’s a good idea to make a list of questions and follow-up questions. Then, he suggests, you should leave that list in your office. “If you walk [into an interview] with a list of questions,” he says, “you’re scripting the interview. You’ll feel like you need to stay on script if [the interview] moves in a different direction.” Over-preparation can lead to a stale interview. Remember, you can always go back later to ask questions you may have missed or forgotten.

• This may seem counterintuitive, but as an interviewer, you are not after answers. You are after stories. People read stories. “If you are not telling stories,” he says, “you are not being read.” We arrange our lives in stories, so get your subject to tell you theirs.

• There’s a lot of hype about the mystery of establishing a rapport with your subject. Here’s the secret, straight from Dale: “Ask a short question, then shut up and listen.” People cannot resist talking about themselves and their passions. “The problem,” he says, “is not getting them to talk. It’s getting them to shut up.”

Everybody Wants to be a Spelling Cop

DISCLAIMER: All apparent misspellings in this blog are in fact typos, or a sign that the language is evolving before your very eyes.

David Wolman, author of Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled History of English Spelling, is about to speak to the best audience he may ever encounter: 200 word nerds, licensed to eat, shoot and leave. We are the kind of people who aced every grade school spelling test and now take Sharpies to well-intentioned but orthographically challenged signage. It is red ink that pulses through our veins.

Or so you might think. As it turns out, conference co-chair Matt Jennings confesses himself a bad speller, a revelation that just goes to show how far Spellcheck can take a young man and his dreams – to wit, to the Middlebury editorship and the chance to spend three blue-blazered days in the basement ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, Stockton St.

As it also turns out, Wolman himself cannot spell, a handicap that has not prevented his work from appearing in Newsweek, Wired, New Scientist and, now, at the Editors' Forum 2009.

Whew

The 2009 Editors' Forum is over-- but there's more to come!

During the course of the next few days, we'll be posting reports from general sessions and workshops, so please bookmark the site and check back soon for accounts of the conference.

As I mentioned at the close, we'll also be posting Gerry Marzorati's remarks, and I'm working on uploading the Powerpoint presentation for the session Jason Treat and I did on magazine covers. If anyone would like me to e-mail the file to them (rather than waiting for the PowerPoint), just drop me a line at mjenningATmiddlebury.edu. And for the folks who have already given me their business cards for this purpose, I have you covered.

Well, I'm off to go find a gift for my little boy....but not before once again offering a big thank you to a dedicated faculty, amazing speakers, and a wonderful cohort of editors, writers, designers, and art directors who came together and spent what I hope they found to be three invigorating, fun, emotional, and educational days. I know I found that to be the case.

Matt

The New, New, New Journalism

 Keynote Address

The New, New, New Journalism?

Gerry Marzorati, editor-in-chief, New York Times Magazine

Wednesday, March 25, 4-5:15 p.m.

Standing in line to order lunch one afternoon last September, Gerry Marzorati watched a man in his early 20s straining to read his Blackberry. When Marzorati managed to get a glimpse of the screen, he realized the man was reading a cover story from The New York Times Magazine—a 10,000-word nonfiction narrative about the tribal areas of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan.

“My first question was ‘Why would anyone want to read 10,000 words of anything that way?’” Marzorati told the CASE conference attendees Wednesday afternoon. Delving into a world where communication has been reduced to text messages and twitter tweets, Marzorati explored the relevance of long-form magazine journalism. “I am worried that I—and others who do what I do—will be turning out the lights on what I do after not too long.”

With “Blackberry dude” serving as a cornerstone for his keynote address, Marzorati discussed the differences in how people are reading. On one hand, the Blackberry carrier was reading; on another, he wasn’t paying to read it.

Defining long-form journalism as pieces of 8,000 to 15,000 or more words, Marzorati described the art in the presentation of these well-researched stories, offering examples from The New York Times Magazine. Often built around scenes or journeys, each piece can take as long as an hour to read.

“The bet is that the narrative will be so carefully constructed to drag you in,” he said. But his concern for the genre’s fate was evident. The cost of a typical cover story in The New York Times Magazine—photography excluded—can cost more than $40,000. “Often if a war zone is involved, considerably more,” he said. “And if a reader is an online reader, paying nothing, who’s going to foot the bill?”

Marzorati treated his listeners to a historic look at the history of long-form magazine journalism, placing its start at August 31, 1946, when The New Yorker published a piece telling the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and highlighting the genre’s explosion in the 1960s. He defined long-form journalism as a distinctly American form in which information is transformed into experience. “We crave stories, all cultures do, but we also crave facts, lots of facts, and facts are more compelling and easier to digest, when arranged narratively.”

Despite issues of access today as writers try to uncover this type of in-depth story, Marzorati noted that long-form journalism is still possible in health and science, sports writing, stories about the poor, and war reporting.

Looking at people like “Blackberry dude” who read the Times Magazine’s cover story online each week—as many as hundreds of thousands of people—Marzorati considered that some of those readers live in places where the print version is not available. “But I imagine that most of them are like my teenage son and are undaunted by clicking 25 times to get through a piece. This is good news,” he said. “Our most popular pieces are the longest.”

In the online version of stories, The New York Times Magazine sprinkles links, embeds video, provides space for comments, and often has the author of the piece online to take questions. Particularly topical pieces are placed online early, intending to drive people to buy the print publication. “And I’m OK with that. The work that my staff and I work hard to create gets before more eyeballs as a result. But…what are those eyeballs actually experiencing?”

For example, how can a reader understand the research behind the piece—and, without the weight of the magazine in his hands, how can a reader comprehend the authority of the words, Marzorati asked. “And without buying that object, how is the reader to understand that this piece is not just a lengthy rift written by someone in his pajamas, but an expensively produced report?”

 Those questions, Marzorati estimates, will be answered in the next four or five years.

In response to one question about the fact that two of the past six covers have been basketball related, Marzorati said, “People really think that there’s an enormous engine of contemplative decision making that goes on, not like ‘Oh s---, we don’t have anything to run this week.’ And it’s much more the latter than you would think.”

Discussing the stories and online features that attract the most interest, Marzorati said the magazine editors are careful not to let popularity dictate all of the story choices. “We know very clearly what stories get the most traffic and make it onto the most e-mail lists. It’s a temptation that you have to be careful about. Stories about health, stories about sex, stories about religion, that’s your top tier, then you go down to education and then foreign (is) nowhere.”

Asked how to write fresh, timely stories for a less-often-published higher ed magazine when news changes constantly, Marzorati said, “Those big stories keep coming back, so your story runs into the news anyway. If you have something fresh to say about any of those topics, that will be fine. Leverage to the people you are actually near. People are interested in people who think. They’re getting their actual raw information somewhere else. But if you have some really smart, interesting professor on your campus who’s thinking about these things in a new way, leverage that. There’s a reason why the Times op/ed page gets a lot more traffic than our news stories. People get a sense that they know what the news is. What they want is someone who can give you a quick take on it.”

The magazine has spent a fair amount of money on video without seeing much traffic to those features, Marzorati said. Slideshows, however, have been inexpensive and popular. The magazine’s parenting blog has been successful as has a weekly food recipe show called “Tiny Kitchen.”

“The key is that you don’t have to be the programmer. You don’t have to know the technology any more than you have to know how the printing press worked,” he said. “It’s changing so, so rapidly that it’s not your job to actually know how it all works. But it is your job to try to figure out what it is works for your publication in the experience of this new medium or media.”

Though one questioner asked how to write for a generation without an attention span, Marzorati said he is not convinced that is true. “This form of journalism I’m talking about has never been a mass form anyway,” he said. “What I see is a difference in what people will read about.” His magazine sees an increase in interest in what the editors there call “the way we live now” or lifestyle stories and stories with an emotional content, inside a family or a relationship.

“People will sit and listen to ‘This American Life,’ which is really an oral form of long-form journalism in a way,” he said. “There’s also an appetite in this country for documentary filmmaking that never existed before, which again is a form of long-form journalism.” 

Addressing whether journalism should be funded through foundations and educational institutions, Marzorati said the problem goes beyond long-form journalism. “The truth is that there’s no reporting that’s going on in this country today that’s profitable. Reporting is just not profitable, whether you look at newspaper reporting, whether you look at television news. All that reporting is one way or another being subsidized.”

Instead, while upper-class Americans have never been better informed, the country has seen an increase in supermarket tabloid journalism, “digested by the have-nots,” and leading to a “coarsening” of American culture, Marzorati said. “We don’t really feel it because we’re reading the Economist and we’re reading newspapers. To be educated and sophisticated in this culture is to have access to high-quality information. But that information is not getting to a vast majority of Americans.”

—Rita Buettner

Editors' Note: We will be posting Marzorati's entire remarks in the next couple of days.