Meeting Recap for Feb. 20: Skype with Jason Tanz, Executive Editor of Wired

Last week we skyped with Jason Tanz, the executive editor of Wired Magazine. Jason has a lot of experience and had lots of great advice to share with us!

Background: Jason was a political science major at Brown University. He says the political science major is his "unending regret" and really doesn't think it's the best choice. He did take one journalism class his sophomore year and he worked on one of the school newspapers where he says he "sort of fell in love with the late nights once a week, putting together this newspaper, staying up all night, hopping in the car at 2:30 to get to Taco Bell before it closed, then two days later receiving bundle, dropping it off at the cafeteria, and watching people read it."

A couple of years after graduating, Jason moved to New York City and considered going to journalism school. A friend of his cousins (who worked at Smart Money Magazine) told him that "journalism school is great if you don't know anyone," and then connected him to some people at this start up trade publication called university business. Jason began working there, covering the tech beat and was later hired at Smart Money Magazine as a staff reporter. Jason had a few of his pieces published in the magazine, but after a while he decided to leave to become a freelance writer.

Jason soon got sick of pouring his heart into a story and having an editor not like it so he got a job at Fortune as an editor, and then moved to Fortune Small Business before getting a fellowship at the University of Michigan. While at the University of Michigan, Jason wrote a book proposal about "rap music and white people."

And that's when Jason got an email from Wired. Someone at Smart Money had mentioned Jason to an editor at Wired and the next thing he knew he was working as senior editor. Jason was very recently promoted to executive editor and moved from New York to San Francisco.

A typical day for Jason:

• When he was a senior editor it was mostly finding writers, nurturing the writers he already had, shaping pitches for pitch meeting, heavily editing articles
• When Jason was in New York, he was also the "guy on TV" when a show like Good Morning America called Wired for an expert
• Now Jason is increasingly working with new media and trying to integrate the website and the magazine

On the future of magazines:

• Personalities (on the web) can help set you apart
• Wired hasn't lost readers at all, readership has only gone up on web and in print
• They have lost advertisers, but some of these have come back
• Jason says he's not sure the print magazine will still exist 15 years from now, but he thinks there will still be an appetite for a product that’s presented like an object whether that's once a month, week, day or minute
• "As long as people want well written stories, I don’t care how they want it—paper, screen, beamed onto retinas."
• A high priority at Wired right now is to reboot their iPad app

Internship program at Wired:

• It's based in San Francisco and it's called a "fellowship"
• It's paid
• They look for someone with a sense of humor and hungry intellect--someone who likes arguing ideas
• Someone with great clips and a proof read cover letter
• Be sure to show personality, but not so much that it's weird
• Someone who's really interested and curious about technology—showing that you can think about technology in an interesting way is more important than knowing about technology
• Writing skills aren't negotiable

Last words:

• "I've had a long history of working at places that didn’t particularly interest me. The greatest luxury is working at a magazine that you would choose to read yourself, and I do love Wired. I would read it, and I love the people I work with."