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People in glass houses throw bones

When Wired Magazine promised last year to go “transparent,” I understood they’d be talking about their own writing and editing process in the webpages of Wired.com. I didn’t know they’d also air their innards at other sites.

When Wired writer Fred Vogelstein published a dossier on himself — a dossier Microsoft’s PR firm Waggener Edstrom had compiled to “steer” him toward writing a positive story of Microsoft for Wired — on Wired.com, Valleywag publisher and interim editor Nick Denton noticed that someone Wag-Ed thought Fogelstein would send the firm a copy of his article before it went to press. Of course, that’s something respectable magazines just don’t do. So Fogelstein and his editor Chris Anderson defended themselves — in the comments form on Valleywag. Having edited Valleywag for Denton (see my permanent disclosure), I know this must’ve filled Denton with sweet tabloidy glee. How lovely to get free content from the subjects! In fact, isn’t that the secret purpose of Valleywag?

Bonus: As of Wednesday evening, Wired.com is down and displaying a technical error. Aha, Fred and Chris realized the only way to get read tonight was to post somewhere else!

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Chris Anderson, Nick Denton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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