One of the most encouraging successes in the online world is in front of your eyes, but no one's written the story yet.
It's the saga of a bunch of sharp, Net-savvy young people and a few seasoned reporters and editors launching a news service native to a new medium. It's the story of Wired News.
Don't worry, I'm not going to regale you with that epic here. But it's a little frustrating to read tale after tale of Wired's corporate wins and misadventures and have its most on-target venture come up only as a slightly askew footnote: "Wired magazine's Web site," "an email tech-news service."
Wired News publishes between 20 and 30 original stories a day that you'll never read in the magazine. We're all over beats that other online tech-news outlets don't touch: digital art and music, genetics, the gay and lesbian struggle for equality, space exploration, hacking from hackers' perspectives, the dynamics of thriving online communities, and civil liberties in the digital age.
I'm giving myself license to mention all of this because, after nearly four years at Wired Digital, I'm on my way out the door. I'll be writing for Wired magazine for a year.
It's not just a jump across the hall. Wired Digital and Wired magazine are owned by two different companies now, and I'm losing my office and my staff benefits. But it's a growth move for me. After working at HotWired for two years, I was the first full-time reporter at Wired News. Having filed almost 800 stories on two- and three-hour deadlines, I'm hungry for a new kind of challenge. There's a ripening of perspective that can only happen with weeks to report, write, and edit. When I think back on the stories that I'm most happy to have written for Wired News, they weren't always the big-buzz scoops that got picked up by other media. In an industry dominated by hype and noise, it was the unexpected encounters with the single, fragile human presence that left their lasting impressions on me.
Two years ago, I wrote a story about Bill Bires, a veteran of the top-secret A-bomb tests in Nevada in the 1950s. The other soldiers who kneeled beside young Bires as the blast waves showered them with radioactive dust were dead or dying of mysterious diseases that the government refused to acknowledge. With the help of a publisher friend, Bires launched a Web site called The Atomic Duty of Private Bill Bires as a call in the dark to other survivors of the tests. His lonely journey, and very personal use of the medium, stuck with me.
So did the bittersweet careers of Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon, who together invented one of the building blocks of the modern age, a way of correcting errors in a data stream that made possible hard drives, fax machines, CD players, and all things digital: the Reed-Solomon codes.
Neither Reed nor Solomon got wealthy from the fruits of their labors, because they were so far ahead of any commercial application. Solomon had already died before I wrote that story, having left theoretical mathematics behind to give singing lessons, frustrated that his work had gone unrecognized while thousands of others became millionaires because of it. Irving Reed -- humble, sharp, still innovating -- told me his life story with a quiet dignity that I can still hear.
I also can't forget the engaging earnestness of the young man behind one of the most deservedly despised sites on the Web. While researching a feature about Reverend Fred Phelps' bully pulpit, called God Hates Fags, I discovered that the site -- which practically defines online bigotry, plastered with slogans like "AIDS Cures Fags" -- was actually the brainchild of Phelps' grandson, Ben.
While Ben spent his days weaving his grandfather's rants against gay people and Jews into a chilling showcase of prejudice, he spoke warmly to me about the music he loves, the minority students in his graduate classes, and the friends who had turned their backs on him. The disparity between Ben's humane private self and the public monstrosity he helped create haunted me long after the story was written. And there was a scoop that I felt sad breaking to the world, the news that poet Allen Ginsberg, a former teacher of mine, was terminally ill. I knew that every minute Ginsberg had before that story went out on the wires was another moment to collect his feelings before death and write out the contents of his mind in relative peace. That morning, the ability to publish news almost instantaneously on the Web didn't seem like a blessing.
The changes that have occurred in this medium in the time I've been at Wired Digital are mind-boggling.
When we launched Wired News, an editor could still say, "What is the story on the Web today?" and not be laughed at. Now, most news stories have some online dimension. The Web is less and less like a toy-laden treehouse for bright, creative misfits and more a complex reflection of our world in all its banal and commercial aspects.
I'm leaving Wired News in the best possible hands. The reporters and editors here are the best in the emerging industry. Since November, we've had an editor in chief, George Shirk, who is brave enough to ignore such clichés of conventional un-wisdom as "No one reads on the Net." He gives his reporters all the space they need to dig out the human stories from behind the buzzwords. In a medium that breeds anxiety, Shirk has the rare quality of being able to stay even-minded in a hurricane of competing interests.
The next few months are going to test the mettle of the Wired News team. The Lycos Network is poised to complete (or abort) its buyout of Wired Digital, at the same time that Lycos itself is being snatched up by Barry Diller's USA Networks. I'm frankly relieved to be moving into a slower-growth industry for awhile.
But I'll miss the buzz of working in a new kind of newsroom, where there are only a few crucial moments of decision between the torrent of information flooding in and the steady stream of stories going out. Facing a crunch like that daily is an acid test of a reporter's mind and heart.
In the online community that I hang out in every day, The Well, one of our reporters, Joe Nickell, mentioned recently that his grandmother, Goldie, had just sent him her first email message. When she was a little girl growing up in Monticello, Kentucky, she saw a piano delivered to her house in a horse-drawn cart.
Whatever our fate turns out to be, as we make space in our lives for this new way of learning about one another, may we stay as game to meet it as Goldie.
See you in print.
