![[Wired vs. Wired]](wired960523.gif)
HotWired sends a critical jolt through its print parent
Jon Katz isn't the first critic to slam Wired magazine. But he is surely the first critic to do so in one of Wired's own publications -- and pocket a check from Wired Ventures for the work.
In a three-part series, "Teenage Mutant Power Rangers," that concluded yesterday (you can still read parts 1, 2 and 3), Katz, the media critic responsible for the daily "Media Rant" column in HotWired's Netizen section, writes that Wired takes far too rosy a view of the high-tech future and the companies that are building it. Wired is "the familiar clever adolescent -- hip, hormonally challenged, immortal, obsessed with the Next and Coolest Thing." He attacks the magazine for its "brazen elevation of ruthless dirtballs like Bill Gates, Sumner Redstone and John Malone to the lofty status of new visionaries," and suggests that its increasing orthodoxy leaves it in danger of becoming "yet another despotic and top-directed editorial entity."
Katz writes that Wired, abandoning free inquiry and challenging debate, has adopted utopian futurism as a party line: "Recently, the magazine has seemed to limit itself to a few consistent themes: existing structures suck, the Internet doesn't, and the future will transform everything anyway.... Editors no longer spark and challenge writers but become High Priests. To satisfy them, writers become True Believers and Prophets."
To say all this may be insightful but is hardly revolutionary; to say it in HotWired -- Wired's sister publication on the Web, owned and operated by the same company and overseen by the same editor-in-chief, Louis Rossetto -- takes considerable guts.
"On Monday I thought, I'm not gonna be ranting here by Friday," Katz recalls. But when we talked to him on Wednesday, after his final installment hit the Web, he reported that his position remains secure.
Katz says he got the idea for the articles after writing a series last month from Orlando that analyzed the failed utopian visions of Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: "Looking at Wired, I felt like I was recognizing a lot of those visions in the magazine." Other recent Media Rants suggested that Michael Kinsley, the editor of Microsoft's forthcoming Webzine Slate, would have a hard time maintaining editorial independence, given the nature of his employer.
"People make a big deal about how free the Web is," Katz says -- and he's very publicly been one of those people. "Part of me wanted to make the point more dramatically than I could just by saying it." Katz's buttons were also pushed -- as he recounts in HotWired's reader forum, Thread s -- when he received a "jeering email" from a daily newspaper editor in response to his Kinsley columns: "You have a lot of nerve dumping on corporations. What do you think would happen to you if you took a critical look at Wired?"
No self-respecting muckraker could ignore such a put-up-or-shut-up challenge. Katz says that when he proposed the Wired critique to his Netizen editor, David Weir, "he just said, go for it." The articles were edited "only for clarity." They don't get into any detailed discussion of the editorial approaches of Wired honchos like Rossetto, Kevin Kelly and John Battelle; Katz says, "I didn't include any personalities because I hate that sort of Village Voice-style incestuous nibbling."
"There was an atmosphere of tension around it, but I really had utter faith in Louis Rossetto's libertarianism. The whole time I was thinking that I'd have been fired instantly at any other place I've worked." Of the flood of e-mail he's received since the articles appeared, Katz says he's gotten "heartbreaking" messages from "old media" reporters, all along the same likes: We couldn't do that. We'd be fired.
(For the record, it should be noted that Katz has written for Salon in the past, and that David Weir once worked with Salon, too. For that matter, I have written for Wired and HotWired. After all, it is a small world.)
Rossetto said in a phone interview Thursday that Katz's critique didn't sting because it was inaccurate: "The substantive criticism that we're uncritical boosters of a revolution is fundamentally flawed. We've run all sorts of stories, from techno-fascism in Singapore to the day after Chernobyl to the great Web wipe-out piece -- which basically talks about the extinction of our own business -- and we've done it with relish. So we are observers of the scene, and pretty accurate ones at that. Still, debate is fine, and it's better that it be in our pages than in someone else's."
"It's not even a lovers' spat -- it's more a lover's chance to vent. Of course, we haven't vented back at Katz," Rossetto added, though he says he's not planning any retributive diatribes.
To be sure, Katz's series wasn't wholly critical of Wired: It stroked the magazine by insisting on its importance, and Katz plainly offered his analysis as someone who cares about Wired's direction and health. Meanwhile, next month's Wired features a cover story, on children's rights in the digital age, by none other than Jon Katz.
And there is something a little stunt-like in Katz's exercise, a kind of knee-jerk bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you reflex that is often imprinted in obstreperous journalists. It may remind you of Michael Kinsley's stated intention of featuring, in his first edition of Slate, a roundtable discussion of Microsoft's monopolistic practices. (For a display of far more extreme knee-jerkism, see Suck's Thursday commentary on the Katz series. Katz may "blast Wired and write for it too," just like the Sucksters, who are now just another part of the HotWired empire. But at least his blasts carry some substance -- Suck's are just snottiness on autopilot.)
In its own way, "Teenage Mutant Power Rangers" is surely a small landmark in the evolution of the concept of editorial independence in the new media. Critics like Katz have been instrumental in spreading the gospel that the freewheeling, reader-responsive nature of the Net can transform journalism in positive ways. But while the new media may lack the ossifying hierarchies and hermetic isolation of their traditional predecessors, they have also grown up without the protection of old-fashioned traditions like the "church-state" separation of editorial and advertising.
HotWired is eager to be perceived as feisty and irreverent. But it's also leading a move on the Web to adopt models from television broadcasting rather than print journalism. It calls its editors "producers" and its sections "channels." No doubt it hopes to emulate the TV model's success at drawing ad revenue.
Its leaders need to remember that, in the TV world, biting the hand that feeds you doesn't work. You've heard of ombudsmen at newspapers, but how many TV stations air criticisms of their own policies -- except under threat of lawsuit? And nothing flops faster on TV than attacks on sponsors; consider the quick demise of the "Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show."
The real test of Katz's freedom will come not in the immediate aftermath of his series but in the long haul: does he continue to get plum assignments from Wired and HotWired or is he frozen out of their councils? Is his voice prominent or marginalized?
Katz writes that Wired's "bristly and hostile" attitude is a sign of adolescence. Similarly, the ability to take criticism is a sign of maturity. How Wired deals with Katz's analysis institutionally will provide one good measure of how successfully it's growing up. Adults find healthy ways to mobilize self-criticism toward growth. But it's also in that rocky transition from adolescence to maturity that the worst forms of mental illness manifest themselves.