Wired’s resurrection in the UK and Italy will also come with more new sites offered in several new languages. International president Stefano Maruzzi said the new operation, which was announced in June and will debut early next year, will also add Chinese, French and more, each produced in London.
“We’re not going to limit our online experience to those two languages (English and Italian) – we’re going to add more languages at the very beginning,” he told paidContent:UK. “We will have a team here in London who will deliver content in French and Chinese and other languages. We want to make it a natural extension of the magazine on the web,” he said, acknowleding the strategy was still nascent. “This is a vague definition because the two magazines will be different. ”
Will there be distinct “Wired UK”, “Wired Francais” websites? “The editorial personality and identity of the linguistic versions will be similar, then we have to adapt it a little bit to the local culture and local needs. It will be one single concept articulated in multiple languages. Some content will be originally created in Chinese, for example, and some content will be localised, translation from English in to the local language.”
Conde has picked CNET (NSDQ: CNET) UK editor Michael Parsons, a ZDNet veteran, as editor-in-chief of its London online operation, Maruzzi revealed. He will join a team comprising Jewish Chronicle editor David Rowan as UK mag editor and multimedia polymath Ben Hammersley as associate editor. “It’s a very ambitious project,” Maruzzi added.
Maruzzi’s philosophy of “one single concept articulated in multiple languages” is something he’s applied to other sites in the Vogue publisher’s portfolio. The former MSN international director – who now heads online for all Conde’s nine territories outside the US – arrived at the publisher in March 2007, set about ripping up its web strategy and started again, killing off individual strategy quirks operated by individual international offices and instead introducing standardised processes in his own image.
“We had to change the culture to meet Conde Nast ideas of quality but adapt to the internet,” Maruzzi told the Association of Online Publishers conference in London on Wednesday. He hired “a wave of barbarians” to shake things up. The result? “We changed the culture so much that a lot of people decided to leave spontaneously – and that was good. We had the opportunity to inject new blood in the organisation. We are changing a lot of staff, it’s very exciting.” He called “the long tail” “a family concept” since the thesis was written by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson