• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, March 3, 2005

Passing a newsstand on the way home from the refinery last night, I had a rare "you had me at hello" moment with a magazine. It wasn't a reed-thin Olsen twin that caught my eye, nor a shot of Barry Bonds' globe-sized noggin. Rather, it was a headline streaked ankle-high on the cover of the March issue of Wired: "The Turbo-Flush, Hands-Free Toilet Is Here!"

Tomorrow's super-toilets in Wired? What's next, Cahiers du Cinema reexamining Pia Zadora's celluloid legacy? The "Jackass" crew in National Geographic? Okay, bad example.

A few years back, Wired was pigeonholed - unfairly, I think - as a mere "technology magazine." It chronicled everything that progressive-minded geeks could possibly need to know, the argument went, leaving the bona fide bid-ness stuff to the comparatively staid trifecta of Fortune, Forbes, and BusinessWeek.

Then, as now, that argument doesn't hold water. What Wired recognized ahead of many of its peers was that dot-com-era technology and business were inextricably intertwined, and were unlikely to disengage anytime soon. Most publications covered the tech boom as a fly-by-night sensation; Wired approached it as a way of life. Thus, when the smoke cleared, Wired emerged with more credibility than nearly all of its peers.

I'd argue that Wired is more than anything else a magazine about ideas, and how the people who birthed them leveraged and often recast technology to make them real. Take the toilet story, merrily dubbed "The King of Thrones." A lesser mag might have gone with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge angle and soiled itself with groanworthy puns. Wired, on the other hand, surveys water-conservation concerns as well as the difficulties of evaluating toilets under real-world conditions. The end result: a wildly informative and entertaining piece of journalism.

This who/how/why-it-matters approach serves the magazine well throughout the March issue. Wired ain't exactly first out of the gate with its cover on radio's future, but true to form, it identifies a handful of as-yet-uncovered story hooks. Most illuminating is the feature on Podcasting, a nascent do-it-yourself technology that counts former MTV veejay Adam Curry (yes, the guy with the feathered hair... what'd you look like in 1987, anyway?) among its godfathers.

Surprisingly, Wired's annual Rave Awards feature disappoints, if only because the winners' forward-thinking exploits have been chronicled ad infinitum elsewhere. Even so, the photographs of the honorees are astonishingly inventive, especially a shot of the "Halo 2" production crew framed in the helmet visor of one of the game's characters. Graphically, few magazines even approach Wired's level of creativity and sophistication - why haven't publishing behemoths whisked away the mag's creative personnel and charged them with revamping visually tired titles?

Finally, the mag's video game and gadget coverage feels a little bit flat. There's nothing wrong with the reviews per se, but they are interchangeable with the ones in Entertainment Weekly, FHM, and every other publication that covers the space even casually. You'd think Wired would better leverage the superior knowledge and foresight of its editorial staff, rather than highlighting the same six gizmos that blipped on everybody's radar following their debut at January's Consumer Electronics Show.

As far as quibbles go, however, this one barely registers. In the end, it's pretty simple: Wired remains one of the few magazines that truly "gets it." If you're in a business touched any way by the convergence of technology and business - media, publishing, advertising, whatever - Wired belongs on your mandatory monthly reading list.