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By David Rothman

image Wired Magazine and Wired.com are among Si Newhouse’s properties, but he’s an old media guy at heart. That’s not necessarily bad. I love the in-depth reportage of the kind Newhouse encourages at his holdings  like the New Yorker, and it’s all the more reason for me to care about grubby issues such as screen viewability of e-readers. I keep rooting for the better elements of the old media to make the transition more gracefully than most have.

Now, fittingly, Steve Fishman has written a long profile of Newhouse in New York Magazine, and it’s a real treat, which I’ll hereby recommend to Adam Hodgkin, the magazine-lover over at Exact Editions. Here’s Fishman’s lowdown on Wired.com and Si’s ‘tude toward the Web:


Magazines in general and Condé Nast in particular are certainly not as threatened in the short term as are newspapers. But Newhouse has been slow to get his mind around any significant brand extensions into the new medium. For nearly a decade, Newhouse opposed purchasing Wired.com. Three years ago, Donald Newhouse’s son Steve finally pulled off the deal, and the website now has sixteen times more unique visitors than the magazine has in circulation. Still other towering brands like Vogue have lain largely fallow.

As a rule, Newhouse has kept his editors away from the web. He has also rarely pushed publishers in that direction, seeing the Internet as a vehicle for selling magazine subscriptions and not much else. And the revenues are comparably minor. He can’t get excited about them—“a painting to Si,” says one cynical former executive. Only about 3 percent of Condé Nast ad revenues came from digital last year, according to Advertising Age, among the lowest in its class.

 
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