The Freeconomics of Wired

It could only be on Gawker:

For a digital bible, Wired has been turning surprisingly analog over the past year. The latest regressions: The publication just fired two top editors from Wired.com and may soon lose the founders of Reddit.com.

The print version of Wired, you may recall, is run by Freeconomics pundit Chris Anderson:

Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Subsidy for the advertising haemorrhaging print version then, and only Freeconomic straws to the rescue then for the online version? As Gawker points out, despite McKinsey advice, its hard to understand:

...why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems.

This one we will watch with interest..... we suspect this is a case of all the king's horses and all the king's (hired) men still fighting the previous war.

Update - at the risk of teaching McKinsey to suck eggs, I'd point Conde Nast at this precis of work we've done on the dislocation of the media industries. In a nutshell, you don't win by cutting costs on the future growth industry while subsidising the old ones. Option theory and all that, boys....