'Wired's' elitist futurism now grounded in the reality of readers.

This article reports on the acquisition of Wired by Conde Nast Publications in June 1998. While Wired gains the endorsement of an old-guard print publishing company, it continues to reinvent itself through the models and aspirations of new media. Editor in Chief Karina Heron, who came to the magazine in 1995 and took her current post when Louis Rossetto, founder of the magazine, stepped down last December 1997, says, "For me, Wired is a good example of a bona-fide virtual community that can exist between editors and readers." Harder to pin down categorically than most print publications, Wired is a technology-business-culture hybrid that Conde Nast Editorial Director James Truman praises as "a very unusual magazine."