Scott Dadich, the top editor at Wired magazine and its digital properties for the last four years, is leaving the Conde Nast tech publication.
Wired’s top editor, Scott Dadich, is out
New Yorker digital editor Nicholas Thompson will replace him.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
He’ll be replaced by Nicholas Thompson, who has been the digital editor of the New Yorker, another Conde Nast title.
Dadich, along with marketing veteran Patrick Godfrey, will start Godfrey Dadich Partners, a “strategy, design and content firm.”
Thompson is returning to Wired, where he had been a senior editor from 2005 through 2010.
“Nick is an incredibly accomplished editor and we are confident that his previous experience at Wired combined with a deep knowledge of the tech space will serve to both sharpen and grow the brand,” Conde Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg told Wired employees in an internal memo.
The job swap is happening as Conde Nast goes through another reorganization, as the magazine publisher continues to grapple with the realities of the digital publishing world.
Dadich, who had been at Conde Nast for 11 years, had once been the beneficiary of digital disruption. Back in 2010, when Apple launched the iPad, he was in charge of Conde’s efforts to create “tablet” editions of its magazines for the devices.
At the time, Conde Nast and many publishers had hoped that digital versions of their magazines could help them reclaim attention and economics that Google had siphoned away. But the iPad never delivered what publishers had hoped for, and new challenges — Facebook in particular — have put even more pressure on the industry.
People familiar with Dadich said he had previously floated the idea of gathering a group of investors and buying Wired himself.
“No one can see the future, but I know I’m happiest when I’m chasing it — that’s why I’ve loved creating a new Wired every single day. Covering the worlds of business and technology, however valuable, is watching from the sidelines. I felt it was time to get in the game with my own company,” Dadich said in a press release.
Last year, a series of editors left the magazine, culminating in the departure of creative director Billy Sorrentino, who went to Apple.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
