Not Lost at all but quite Wired, really

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard the sad, sad story of the demise of print journalism. Most of the time the story is about hapless journalists trying to figure out what to do in an increasingly wired world that finds their newsprint products increasingly boring and irrelevant. So it is with some relish to see the folks at the print version of Wired magazine (a good read really. Unspun‘s recently taken to buying it from newsstands) come up with a strategy that engages some of its readers. It is too early to tell whether or how this strategy can be played out over successive editions but its good nonetheless to see some ingenuity addressing the issue of making print journalism continuously relevant to its readers instead of the usual whinge.

A Magazine With a Puzzle Buried Inside By DAVE ITZKOFF Published: April 20, 2009 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