Q&A With Wired Publisher Howard Mittman

Wired has been on a bit of a run. Depending on how you look at it, that run may have started back at its launch in 1993, when its founders, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, decided to chronicle the ideas and innovations shaping the digital age and changing the world. Or you could argue that that run started with Howard Mittman, who came on board in 2006 as associate publisher and who has served as vice president and publisher of Wired since 2009. Mittman has also played a big role in the expansion of the brand's digital business: In 2012, Wired became one of the first magazine brands to derive 50% of advertising revenue from its digital offerings. The Wired tablet app, launched in 2010, is often ranked at the top of best-tablet lists. And as a feather in his cap, Wired was named the first ever Magazine of the Decade by Adweek Media. But don't refer to Wired as just a magazine. "We don't think of ourselves as a magazine," says Mittman. "When you have a robust video business, and an amazing website, and an incredibly strong mobile business, a tablet business, a massive social media footprint and a robust event business, you become a lot more than just a traditional magazine. I think of ourselves as a horizontal organization that tends to provide compelling, interesting content wherever our community happens to be." Here Mittman discusses how the Wired he's helped take to great heights is the fulfillment of the multifaceted media brand its founders originally envisioned. How have you been able to successfully build Wired into a multi-channel media brand?Wired was born as a magazine and a website on the same day, so integration is born into our culture. The original mission of Wired was for it to be an event company, a design firm, a full-scale content provider, a video studio. We were to be much more than a just a magazine with a website, and I think right now today we're closer to fulfilling that original founder's mission than any time over the 20-year history of Wired. I think Wired has a tremendous amount of whitespace around it. And that whitespace is business opportunity that allows us to reach our community in a variety of different ways. So we have permission from our community to reach out into events and social media and video production and areas that make us much more than just a traditional magazine. Right now 10% of your overall subscriber base is on tablets. Do you see the tablet as the home of Wired magazine in 5 or 10 years?If you're asking if it's the future of Wired, I think the creation and delivery of compelling original content regardless of platform is the future of Wired and all media. I expect the tablet will be a part of that, yes. However, I think the responsibility we have is to be everywhere that our community is and make sure we play an active, participatory and engaging role in those existing and emerging distribution mechanisms. Have advertisers been slow to gravitate to the tablet?We've done quite well monetizing the tablet product from a consumer marketing and an advertising perspective, but I think we need to be flexible in our understanding of the reality that this is a percentage of our revenue growth -- it is not 50% of our business at this point. As the business model evolves in the future I suspect it will look very different than it does today, the same way the web has evolved in those same ways and that it will grow in line with the penetration it has-you have to have more people with tablets to have a bigger business. Maybe that grows purely in a linear fashion along tablets, or maybe it's a combination of phones and tablet, or maybe there's something we haven't even seen yet that becomes our reality. Do you think you've benefited from a tech-savvy readership when it comes to exploring new platforms? I think Wired benefited from having an affluent, early-adoptive audience and an editorial team whose mission is not just to chronicle the future, but to play an active role in helping to shape it. No other media brand can lay claim to the kind of consistency of innovation that Wired can. Wired invented the banner ad. Wired invented the blog. Wired invented the Apache operating system. And Wired played a significant role in the release of the DPS that led to the Wired app. That kind of consistent level of innovation and contributions to the media landscape is something that makes us very special and is unlike any other media brand that I can think of. Given how multifaceted Wired has become, what aspect of the brand do you think your community identifies with the most?Wired is about ideas and innovation, and how ideas fueled by innovation can change the world. As our editor-in-chief Scott Dadich likes to say, Wired is about that exact moment where the future meets the present. And chronicling that and forecasting it and exposing our community to those ideas of what the future will hold is inevitably Wired. And that is Wired in print or on tablet or on the web or at an event -- that's our story and that's who we are and the kind of people that want that come to Wired in droves. You recently partnered with Target on Wired-endorsed product displays. What led you to this type of effort? I think that's a really good example of how we're learning to leverage the power of the Wired brand in a variety of scenarios. Retail is something we have a deep interest in. For 20-plus years Wired has created consumer desire and brought products, ideas and innovations to our users, so the Target program became a natural extension of that and gave us some real specific data that has led us to understand exactly what the true power and reach of our retail opportunities is. What role do events like Wired Café at Comic-Con play in the Wired ecosystem?All our events afford us the opportunity to bring the brand to life for our community and our advertisers. They're critical to our mission to connect with consumers in every aspect of their increasingly fragmented lives. These give us a chance to bring live experiences to readers, to users, and connect with them in a deeper, more meaningful way. Advertisers, of course, are always invited to be a part of that. Where do you see growth for publishers in the near future?I think we're in an interesting moment right now because news is a commodity and that means that the value of news is decreasing with every passing day. I think context has value. I would not want to be in the business of keeping up with the increasing speed of how information travels. With that said I'm quite secure with our ability to maintain a healthy voice within and to the Wired community-and the way we'll do that is leveraging those distribution mechanisms and technologies to provide context. Breaking news will always be a small part of what we do, but if that's all you do I think you're in an absolute race to the bottom and you're in what appears to me to be an unwinnable war with technology.Speaking of technology: do content curating tools like Flipboard work toward or against your mission to provide context?I've been pretty public with my feelings on Flipboard so I'm loathe to get back into that again. Wired is available on Flipboard in a minimalistic way and my strong belief is that if you want read Wired and interact with Wired you need to do so on our owned and operated channels. And not specific to any one company or platform, I'm not a big fan of organizations that seek to sit between the user and my content. That doesn't work for me.Long-term, what do you think the future holds for publishers?We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the definition of what it means to be a content provider. I think you have two options: you can hold on to the old model for dear life and squeeze as much time out of that as you can, or you can write the script for what the future of this business will be. I hope we can add to the list of iterations that Wired has had so that in 5 or 10 years we're not just limited to the banner ad, the blog and the tablet, but there are a whole host of innovations that come out of what we do. PE Read more from the December issue of Publishing Executive.

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Q&A With Wired Publisher Howard Mittman

Denis Wilson

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Denis Wilson