April 21, 2009
A Magazine With a Puzzle Buried Inside
By DAVE ITZKOFF
A few nights ago Steven Bevacqua, a postproduction supervisor for the television series “Life,” was flipping through the May issue of Wired magazine when he thought he started seeing secret messages. Yes, he’d just come home from a long day at work, but then again, the issue was guest-edited by J. J. Abrams, a creator of enigmatic television shows like “Lost” and “Fringe.”
So, as Mr. Bevacqua wrote on his blog, he spent the next several days following the hidden clues he believed he’d found, using Morse code, alternative computer keyboard layouts and even electrician’s wiring codes to solve the covert brainteasers. Finally he was directed to a hidden Web site, from which he sent an e-mail message to a secret account. A short while later he learned that he was the first Wired reader to solve an extensive hidden puzzle embedded throughout the magazine.
It all happened a little faster than the editors of Wired expected, but this was the intent of their new issue, created in collaboration with Mr. Abrams: to immerse their audience in a series of riddles — some announced, others not — that were buried just deep enough for the readers who wanted to dig them up.
In doing so, the editors of Wired said, the project might help them solve another problem: how to keep consumers interested in the tangible artifact of a printed magazine — particularly one about digital culture — in an Internet era.
“We like to say it’s our jobs to add value to the Internet,” said Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired. “The great thing about this issue is that none of the puzzles work online.”
It’s not uncommon for magazines to resort to guest editors to help corral celebrity contributors for their pages and generate publicity. (See Bono’s recent tour of duty at Vanity Fair or Roseanne Barr’s infamous stint at The New Yorker.) Likewise, Wired, owned by Condé Nast Publications, has previously allowed the architect Rem Koolhaas, the director James Cameron and the video game designer Will Wright to each take a turn in the editor’s chair.
For its latest issue, Wired wanted Mr. Abrams’s contributions and sensibility on every page, and devoted the entire magazine to the topic of mystery as a catalyst for imagination (inspired by a lecture given by Mr. Abrams at the 2007 TED conference, an annual symposium on technology, entertainment and design): there are articles about a perplexing American landmark called the Georgia Guidestones, how stage magic affects our brain chemistry and how scientists use an online game called Foldit to help determine the structure of proteins.