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

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.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Howdy. I'm Patrick, one of the guys doing the pre-conference workshop, "Beyond the PDF". Our plan for the workshop is to share thoughts / experiences in publishing... both in print and on the web, both inside and outside of higher-ed. To provide some context for where I'm coming from I thought it'd be helpful to crank out a series of blog posts highlighting magazines I think do good jobs fusing print / web (as well as a post or two on magazines that could/should be doing a much better job).

Without further delay...

GOOD is Great
Do you know GOOD magazine? I hope so, because it rocks. In addition to being beautifully designed and compellingly written it's also one of the most socially aware publications I've read. In their own words: "GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. Since 2006 we've been making a magazine, videos, and events for people who give a damn. This website is an ongoing exploration of what GOOD is and what it can be." Pretty snazzy, right? It only gets better; 100% of your "subscription" donation goes to a non-profit.

Since I need to constrain the list of things I like about the magazine to a word-count you're willing to tolerate I'll try to be brief. GOOD is one of my favorites because:

1) They indicate what's available in print, what's unique to the web.
When you browse the magazine online, each article has tag that let's you know whether it's repurposed from the print edition or unique to their blog, their video archive or something totally different. Because I have access to both the editions of the magazine, when I'm reading online I tend to concentrate on the additional content only available on the web.

2) You can browse the content available online in a number of ways.
You can browse articles in the web edition by most recently posted, most discussed (the site allows reader commentary) or 'most good' (the site also employs a Digg.com type interface that allows readers to give articles a thumbs-up or thumbs-down). There's also a tag to denote content from the current issue of the magazine.

3) Context is king.
GOOD takes care to provide a lot of contextual info about their content. From an individual article page you can see the additional articles GOOD considers to be related, you can see who else has recently read this article (via the "Recent readers" feature) and you can dive into additional articles written by the current author. So if/when you find an article you really like there's an array of options available to keep exploring the topic.

4) The website hypes the print edition (and vice versa).
The web edition of the magazine clearly highlights the benefits of the print edition while pushing readers to explore physical magazine. And when reading the print edition they're constantly highlighting URLs you can head to in you want more depth.

5) There's a vibrant community, making things happen.
Readers of the online edition are encouraged to create online profiles. Once you have a profile you're able to tag and rate content, to create content and to contact other readers. This allows the calls to action sprinkled throughout both editions to be a lot more meaningful... instead of asking you to read more they're asking you to do more.

So that's my take... I love GOOD. What's your take?

It's Paper *and* Screen

Somewhere around this cluttered pig sty of an office, I have a folder called "Future of Magazines," with articles I've saved about what will become of print magazines in the Internet age. (Ironically enough, I think most of the articles are ones I printed from the Web.) The gist of most of the articles is that print magazines will probably survive for a very long time. But developing really smart Web versions of our magazines is important—and has proven to be a challenge for many schools, my own included. I'd love to share with you a link to the online edition of The Penn Stater, but, um, there is no online edition of The Penn Stater yet. We did recently start a blog, however—you can check it out here if you want.

Jeff Lott at the Swarthmore College Bulletin has taken it a step further and has an entire magazine Web site built on a blog platform. It's a very cool approach, and one that we may someday emulate.

And I'll always be grateful to Ann Wiens for her CUE posting (mentioned in her blog entry today) calling my attention to the existence of lolcats. A fine time-waster if ever there was one!

Paper or Screen

Last summer, when we were first starting to think about the program for this year's forum, a conversation came up on CUE that really resonated with both of us. Under the subject line "From couch to computer," an interesting dialog was shaping up about the print vs. digital conundrum that we're all having to address as editors. This has emerged as one of the major themes of the conference, as we grapple with the relationship of our print magazines to their online cousins. I'd like to take the "vs." out of the "print vs. digital" equation and replace it with an "and."

Matt and I have had several good discussions on this subject over the months, and have put together several sessions that specifically address it. On Thursday afternoon, our panel discussion, The Best of Both Worlds: Making the Most of Interactive/Cross-Platform Media, will feature J.C. Gabel, Editor-in-Chief, Stop Smiling; Doug Gapinski, Design Director, mStoner; Kevin Cool, Editor, Stanford Magazine; and Jason Treat, Art Director, The Atlantic offering their considerable expertise on the subject. For anyone looking to ramp up you magazine's online presence, JC Gabel and Patrick DiMichele, Senior Strategist with mStoner, will offer a preconference workshop on Wednesday to help you do it right.

Following is a portion of the CUE thread "From couch to computer" that got us thinking:

Michelle Dunn of Southern New Hampshire University wrote:

Can anyone point to any research that supports print versions of magazines? I have someone in my office who is interested in the concept of going purely digital, and I think I need something a bit more substantial than "but I like to hold it" or "but I don't wanna" to argue in support of keeping a print version.

Matt Jennings, editor of Middlebury Magazine, responded:

Ask the person what monthly or quarterly magazines he reads and then ask him when the last time he read them online. Ask him when he last read the New Yorker online.

Ask him how many magazines he receives online, that is, how many come to him. Then ask him how many enter his home.

Ask him when he last read a magazine online while commuting on the subway. Or traveling on a plane. Or waiting in an airport.

Ask him when he last read a magazine online when he had retired to bed.

Ask him when he last read a magazine online when he returned home after a long day's work and the last thing he wanted to do was fire up a computer to read.

Ask him how many times he's interrupted while in front of a computer: by the telephone. By an instant message. By a beeping e-mail. Then ask him how many times he's interrupted when he's sitting in a comfortable chair in his den.

Or use this language lifted from Brian Doyle:

"Consider the book and the magazine and the newspaper as technology. They have myriad access points. They are portable. They require no plug nor battery. They can be consumed while supine or in a sampan or at sea. They are recyclable. They can be consumed repeatedly and in some cases should be. They can be operated by infants or elders. They are not draped by safety strictures. They pass easily into hundreds of languages. They are blessedly silent in a world of wheedling. They are designed for your hands. Most of them are substantial in a world of illusion. They can last thousands of years. They are envelopes for ideas. They are objects of grace and beauty. They are envelopes for epiphanies. They harbor hope. They have heft. They wait for you to find them. They grow battered and beloved. Even when ancient they are filled with verve and brio. They preserve voices. They are immortal. They are extraordinary. We take them for granted. Perhaps that is what we do with what we love."

No disagreement here. But I also love, love, love online publications. So I responded with some additional questions for Michelle's office mate:

Please do ask your colleague all the things Matt mentions...his answers will remind you both why we all love magazines, why we read them, collect them, share them, save them to read again later, and why they continue to proliferate despite so many pundits' proclamations of their imminent demise.

But then ask him if he's ever read an interview and wished he could hear the subject's voice, inflection, laugh, or hesitation.

Ask him how many times he's felt the urge to comment on an article he's read--right then, for everyone to see, or to the author alone--but never quite got around to writing that letter to the editor.

Ask him if he's ever read about a piece of music, a movie, a performance, and wished he could see or hear a bit of it, or seen wonderful artwork or photography in a magazine and wanted to see more.

Ask him if he's ever read a poem, and wondered how the poet would read it.

Ask him how many times he's read about a topic and wanted to research it further, or read a book review and meant to order the book, or read an article that he wanted to share with someone but never quite managed to photocopy and mail it.

Ask him if he likes lolcats.

Print and online magazines are apples and oranges--they're not interchangeable. They're both wonderful, and each can do something the other can't. I agree that "forcing the reader to the web" is probably a futile exercise. But luring them is, perhaps, an option.

Matt's also blogged on the subject for the mStoner blog.

Thoughts?

Ann Wiens
Editor, Demo magazine, Columbia College Chicago
Co-chair, 2009 CASE Editors' Forum