Surprise! If you put a pair of smooth, tanned legs, a whisper of cleavage and a cute face on the cover of a magazine marketed toward tech geeks who are better at running the world than getting laid, it’s going to sell well.
How well? Julia Allison is the fourth-best selling Wired cover model in the history of the Cond?? mag. Not good enough for the medal stand, but good enough to provoke about 103,000 smitten nerds to grab copies off of newsstands.
Moving on…
Last month, it was just Wired and Rolling Stone that the marketing kiddies behind Dexter showed the world. Now, a full-blown newsstand: The New Yorker (with a cover from actual New Yorker illustrator Edward Sorel), GQ, and Esquire get the treatment. This comes, supposedly, on the heels of a marketing trend, where advertisers are using mock magazines to push their product — even though print is dying and everyone is using The Twitter!
CONTINUED »
We’ve already seen the marketing genius behind Showtime‘s excellent serial thriller Dexter at work: Blood-flushing urinals, dead guys on the street, body parts in the butcher’s display window.
To market the series’ third season, which kicks off Sept. 28, Showtime has produced a series of Dexter magazine covers. We’ve got Rolling Stone here, and below, Wired. So they’re marketing these to … savvy media types? Because general audiences are going to prefer more severed body parts.
CONTINUED »
It’s a shame journalism students are still required to memorize the AP style manual. After all, it’s not like any newspapers going to have job openings when they graduate!
So Wired is stepping in with its own style guide, but it’s going to focus on more than spelling, grammer, and whether “Internet” should or shouldn’t be capitalized. “The updated stylebook will highlight such current Web-publishing issues as anti-spam techniques, online community standards and ways to increase rankings on Internet search engines like Google, [Wired.com editor Evan] Hansen said. Wired also intends to educate journalists about appropriate, not to mention legal, behavior on the Web.”
Fun! But if they really want to publish a service book for Web 2.0 journos, they can remind magazine reporters of important life lessons, such as ragging on one of your publisher’s biggest advertisers will get you fired. Oh: And names of magazine are italicized, while article titles are put in quotes.
Details publisher Chris Mitchell moves over to Wired to take the same slot, left empty by The Atlantic‘s poaching of Jay Lauf. [MIN]
Steven Levy, a 12-year veteran tech columnist at Newsweek, a magazine we never pick up, is leaving to join join Wired, a magazine we never tear from its polybag. [Romenesko]
The Columbia Journalism Review Daily directs us to this lovely meta meta blogger-on-blogger chat fest that ran in the recent issue of Wired. Former Wonkette Anna Marie Cox interviews Markos Moulitsas aka “Kos” about the lovely topic of baseball.
Mind you, they use the word snarky in the first sentence, and the topic of “baseball” is more or less “Kos’ new network of sports blogs” so … yeah, they are basically talking about blogs. The Daily concludes that this whole shpeal is just one over-exposed blogger interviewing another — something of which they thought 2006 would never see the light of.
And then Kos drops this lovely piece of info on us, in regards to how important while simultaneously detached and apathetic he is.
“Do you know how many interviews I turned down today?” Moulitsas tells Cox at one point. “ABC, NBC, Charlie Rose, McLaughlin Group, not to mention a bunch of radio. If I were into self-promotion, I would have said yes to all of them.”
See, because obviously this Wired piece is not self-promotion. It’s just chatting about baseball which just happens to be a topic of his new blog network. And the Daily just happened to drop a Romenesko mention and Romenesko just happened to pick up the story.
No self-promotion going on here folks. Just keep movin’, nothing to see.
Wired’s Tired Portrait of an Overly Familiar Blogger [CJR Daily]
Speaking with I Want Media, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson defends his print medium in a field (technology) where new inventions like computers and the Internet and infringing on his format.
You see, print stays relevant because when it comes to digesting news online, readers have to click links! Sometimes multiple times!
IWM: Given the subject matter of Wired — does a print magazine format make sense anymore?
Anderson: A monthly magazine like ours — which combines long-form journalism, lavish design and high-end photography — really shows paper at its finest. Online, the design is lost, the photos become thumbnails, and you have to click through as many as 16 screens [to read the longer articles].
Chris Anderson: ‘Peer Production Complements Traditional Media’ [IWM]
The dork club kids over at Wired got together and decided that, “hey, nerds are people too.” This may be one of our favorite 2005 lists of the year.
(Do you see what’s happening? We’re now making top ten lists of our favorite top ten lists. Ridiculous…or brilliant?)
Well, even if our list is kind of lame, this list is brilliant, especially because of the loose use of the term sexy. Bloggers seem to dominate the list, however, and we were not included. We’d like to think it’s because we’re not geeks.
2005’s 10 Sexiest Geeks [Kristen Philipkoski , Wired News]
• Looks like Geraldo Rivera needs to invite some chair tossing neo-Nazis on his new syndicated show — and Fox might force him to with his dismal 2.9 rating debut. [TVNewser]
• First Britney Spears‘ new track “And Then We Kissed” makes the Internet leak rounds and then suddenly Kevin Federline‘s attempt at rapping (“Ya’ll Ain’t Ready”) finds itself online too? We love record companies’ in-house PR efforts. [Stereogum, and again]
• Kanye West is filling in for The Game in 50 Cent‘s rap feuds, but this time it’s all politics. Kanye is sticking by his “Bush doesn’t care about blacks” while 50 is, uh, attributing Hurricane Katrina to God. [AP]
• Wired magazine is joining the temporary store craze with a SoHo location filled with gadgets, just in time to make up for lost ad revenue with the holiday shopping season. [Beta News]
• This time next year there could be as many as 96 job openings swarming Mediabistro and ED2010 thanks to Conde Nast’s business unit. [MIN]
• Now that everyone’s all hot and bothered about Internet companies again, iVillage is looking for a suitor. [FT]