Issue 181  28th September 2018

25 Years of WIRED predictions: Why the future never arrives

This past summer, I pulled up a chair—for a time at the Library of Congress—and read every issue of the magazine’s print edition, chronologically and cover to cover. My aim was to engage in a particular kind of time travel.

In this piece, David Karpf tells the story of WIRED, from its bombastic inaugural issue in '94 featuring such self-assured statements like -

“The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button.”

• through to WIRED's and its contributor's many predictions over the past quarter-century, either proven false or true by time, though many will surprise you. Finally, Karpf reaches today, and speaks about what the swaggering, optimistic and loud WIRED of the 90's has become.

A newspaper empire in the balance: the continuing saga of Tronc

Newspapers and the journalists that write them voice their hopes and concerns about the future. The big question is how to survive the tough market for legacy print publications, without a clear path to financial success.

It’s a dark time to be in the media business but its history shows its an important business that is more than the sum of its parts.

It’s one thing to buy an auto parts factory and then sell off the machinery and fire the staff. You lose an auto parts factory, but if you lose a newspaper, the functioning of the city’s democracy fundamentally changes.