Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Good profile of new Wired editor Scott Dadich by Joe Pompeo at Capital New York.
The Lubbock, Tex. native’s meteoric rise was a product of his ability to dazzle his bosses, first as the precocious 24-year-old art director of Texas Monthly and later as Wired’s celebrated creative chief, as a keen translator of those magazines’ high-minded 20th-century sensibilities into the new imperatives of the 21st. People have thought of him, for quite a while now, as a bit of a messiah.
A former engineering major who cut his teeth at an ad agency before getting into magazines, Dadich climbed the ladder from the South Plains to hip Austin and finally the bustling halls of 4 Times Square. His mantle strains under the weight of more than 50 gold and silver medals from the Society of Publication Designers and seven Ellies from the American Society of Magazine Editors. And as the architect of Wired’s iPad app, one of the first tablet editions not only to launch but to show some early signs of success (100,000 single-copy sales, more than the print edition, for the inaugural June 2010 issue, although that number plummeted somewhat in the ensuing months), Dadich comes to his latest role with no shortage of wind in his sails.
