Yes, I’m joining Wired later this spring. I’ll be concentrating on longer stories, and doing what I can to help out with what is already a great operation.
It’s been a wonderful run at Newsweek. For twelve years I’ve covered what I think is the hottest story on the planet for a magazine that’s one of the prime outlets in journalism. But when I was among those offered a buyout (based on age and years of service) I saw it as an opportunity to think about what might be a next step. The logical, as well as the karmic, choice was Wired. I’ve been involved with the magazine from the very beginning; Kevin Kelley assigned a story to me before issue 1.0 came out fifteen years ago. I was on the masthead of that first issue as contributing writer, and stayed there since. The story, about cypherpunks, was on the cover of the second issue and got me going on my book Crypto. I wrote several other big cryptography stories for Wired as well as stories on General Magic and other stuff. Wired has excerpted two of my books: Insanely Great, and The Perfect Thing. In the past few years, I’ve done a series of long profiles for Wired that I’m really proud of, about Stephen Wolfram, Larry Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, and Nick Denton. I really like what the current editors have done with Wired, and I hope to have crazy fun being a part of it. After I complete some stories I’ve already set in motion at Newsweek over the next few weeks, I’ll make the move a few blocks downtown to the magazine’s New York offices. But I’ll also be spending more time on the West Coast, doing research for my Wired stories and also for a book I’m reporting on a company named Google.
