Last Monday, Wired laid off at least six staff, including longtime editor Ted Greenwald, New York editor Mark Horowitz and, we heard, West Coast ad director Moira McDonald, whose tenure dated to the days when founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe owned the magazine more than ten years ago.

Where was Anderson that day? Delivering a no doubt gainful lecture for Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley. A spokesperson tells us Anderson was in the office "all morning," when the firings occurred, before heading off to HP. But Anderson's absence for so much of such a sensitive day at Wired is great ammunition for his critics at Condé Nast, who have long said Anderson's too distracted by his approximately 50 annual lecture gigs, some in far-flung locales like Norway.

It's one thing for Anderson to delegate editorial tasks to lieutenants like executive editor Thomas Goetz or his predecessor Bob Cohn, who jumped to The Atlantic, in plusher times. But with advertising down 50 percent through May, Anderson should — arguably! — be a fixture on the front lines at Wired. Instead he's tweeting his two-week book tour schedule, which reads as follows: "SF, Munich, Naples, Capri, NYC, Toronto, Chicago, Copenhagen, Billund, Manchester, Orlando. Sigh..."

"Sigh" indeed, Chris. But at least all that time away from home and office will help bolster your independent revenue stream. Bet your ex editors wish they had created one of those! When they weren't picking up the slack for absent co-workers, that is.

UPDATE: Anderson tweets he left the office on firing day because he was on a "sales call" for Wired at HP. More sales calls are a good thing — on different days. (We had told a Wired spokesperson we'd heard Anderson was at a "speaking gig" that day and were told, "he was in the office all morning until then.")

(Pic: Anderson, by Dan Taylor)

Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas and copy chief Tony Long were laid off last week, sources tell us, though it's expected the two will stay on through the end of the year. The loss of two people, even high ranking ones, might not seem too brutal but for the website's recent history: it lost a quarter of its staff last November, along with a closely-aligned development executive at parent company CondéNet; then in April it lost more staff, including managing editor Leander Kahney, two other full-time employees, an unknown number of freelancers and several writers at Wired Digital's Ars Technica website.

On top of that, people close to the company whisper that the two founders of social news website Reddit, and potentially other staff, may soon be out the Wired door. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian is planning a celebration to take place on the third anniversary of the site's acquisition by Wired Digital on Oct. 31. And there's reason to think this will be more jovial than your typical Halloween party: Three years is a typical outer limit used in "earn out" agreements, in which startup founders vest progressively more money from their acquirers as time goes on. This gives them incentive to integrate their creation into the acquiring company rather than bolting for the door. Ohanian, believed to be hitting his final earn-out date along with co-founder Steve Huffman, declined to comment.

Of course, there's nothing unusual about entrepreneurial Silicon Valley programmers moving on to new challenges. Reddit would likely continue operating just fine without Ohanian and Huffman. And Wired.com marches forward under editor Evan Hansen.

But it's not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the further reduction of Wired Digital comes as New York-based parent company Condé Nast clings to a magazine-centric business model that's been a real disaster lately. After hiring McKinsey & Company's consultants, Condé closed four magazines and slashed magazine budgets, by 25 percent at many titles. And while Wired Digital's already-bled websites and blogs may have strong traffic, advertising and critical notice — they were recently nominated alongside the Washington Post, BBC and New York Times for the Online News Association's general excellence award — they've been included in the cuts.

So how is Condé expecting to survive the next big tumble in magazine advertising, if not with its websites? Through the vision of print side editors like Wired's Chris Anderson, who seems, to some Condé Nasties at least,to have spent so much time on books and speaking gigs he's forgotten to help sell ads — or to try and truly integrate his magazine with his website? Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Or maybe the Apple Tablet, Microsoft Courier and Amazon Kindle, among other e-readers, will miraculously allow Condé Nast's old business model to seamlessly transition to the digital age, with no real internal changes necessary.

That might all sound preposterous. But it's the best rationale we've come up with for why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems. But we thought Condé might have already hit rock bottom and changed its thinking. Apparently not.

(Pics: Josh Russell, Mat Honan and Roo Reynolds on Flickr.)

This is the very first question from a Q&A with Anderson in the German mag Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let's talk about the future of journalism.
Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don't use the word journalism.

Uhh...

SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.
Anderson: Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore...

SPIEGEL: Which other words would you use?
Anderson: There are no other words. We're in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don't have meaning. What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them.

Uh huh. Then he goes on to talk his new age "Free" shit about how news just "comes to me," but media outlets themselves aren't important. Hey Chris Anderson, I haven't read your new book, but I hear from the internet or whatever that you plagiarized it, and that it sucks. That's that new journalism!
[Spiegel via Media Decoder. Pic: Getty]

Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

Anderson referred to a certain town as "Crescent City (New Orleans)," and the reference caught VQR's Waldo Jaquith, who was reviewing Free, off guard. As he told Fishbowl NY:

At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that.

But Wikipedia's entry for New Orleans only had Crescent City as a nickname, not as the original monicker for the town. So Jaquith ran a Google search using some of Anderson's specific language and — boom! — up came a Wikipedia article describing the origin of the term "Free Lunch," which Anderson had obviously copied from.

I figured that what had happened was that whoever had written it wanted to be cute and call it Crescent City, but also wanted to link to the New Orleans article [on Wikipedia]. So they put it in parentheses,

Then Jaquith remembered Anderson had once, in Free, weirdly put the word "currency" in quotes, so he ran that section through Google too, and found another chunk of text had been copied from the Web. The rest is history.

Anderson might be a plagiarist, but at least he has what poker players refer to as a "tell." And how appropriate, for the editor of Wired, that it's his reluctance to remove hyperlinks.

[Fishbowl NY]

(Pic by Pieter Baert)

Anderson should be given his due for what he's accomplished with Wired. His magazine took home a general excellence prize at the latest National Magazine Awards, along with the prizes for design and best magazine section. It is a favorite of our own readers, and a formidable title.

But Wired is not without its problems, which Anderson is arguably too distracted to fully address. Examples:

Wired.com: A magazine obsessed with technology should have no trouble integrating its print and online editions, but by most accounts the two sides remain deeply divided at Wired, stunting the magazine's online strategy just as print readers increasingly jump online.

Joel Johnson's Boing Boing post is the definitive word on the matter, along with the comments underneath. But there's also history. After Condé Nast acquired Wired.com, Anderson initially ran it as a separate company. He once slammed its interface to bolster the print edition.

And, readership trends be damned, Anderson has made cuts to the online staff, twelve in November and an additional round in April (Condé Nast said only three staff were let go in April, but wouldn't tell us how many freelancers/permalancers/contractors were also cut).

UPDATE: As Anderson points out in an email to us, he does not run Wired.com. But integration is a two-way street, and Anderson at least shares responsibility for friction between the online and print sides, as described in the Johnson thread, and for their disparate strategies. And as his title's top editorial executive, Anderson is in a position to push for changes in the relationship between print and online.

Galavanting over advertising: Anderson makes an estimated $2 million a year giving around 50 speeches, according to numbers compiled by the New York Times. This lucrative circuit takes him to places like Oslo, Norway, where he recently lectured a gathering of marketers. The trips, we hear, do not sit well with Condé's publishing side.

Plagiarism: Anderson has said that, in lifting material off Wikipedia for Free, he simply forgot to convert some footnotes to in-line attributions within the body of the text. But even with attribution, he should have paraphrased the material or, failing that, used quote marks.

Books counter to the recessionary zeitgeist: Granted, the most useful books often demolish conventional wisdom. And successful authors often face swift backlash from New York's finicky media elite. But it's worth noting that Anderson's book Free is coming out at precisely the time many businesses are finding new ways to charge charge customers, rather than new ways to give things away.

Likewise, the sort of niche Web content one might have invested in after reading Anderson's last book, the Long Tail, is faltering amid the advertising downturn.

(Pic by Pop Tech 2008)

Like so many plagiarists before him, Anderson claims his act was unintentional. The Virginia Quarterly Review first reported his copying, and the explanation he gave us is that he and his editors decided to kill Free's footnotes "at the 11th hour;" though much attribution was restored within the body text, Wikipedia sources were not. This was due, according to the statement he sent to VQR, to "my inability to find a good citation format for web sources (I resisted the time stamp proposal)."

The upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for "intellectual debts" Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Like Maureen Dowd before him, Anderson promises to fix everything on the Web:

We'll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date

Update: Hyperion, Anderson's publisher, has gave a statement to VQR backing his mistake-not-plagiarism spin:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

After reclaiming her Twitter name from a fakester, Tina Fey apparently had stage fright.

The Times' Jennifer 8. Lee was awesomely geeky, although she could have worked some kind of "SIGHUP" joke into this one.

British freelancer Louise Bolotin denied a friend request with extreme prejudice.

Wired's Chris Anderson not only gives away his content online, he throws in sassy rejoinders as a bonus.

Blogger Chris O'Leary had a few too many.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin nourished her spawn.

BusinessWeek.com editor John Byrne, whose importance should be evident from his ALL-CAPS username, exposed the inner workings of the world's most boring business magazine.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson opted for "dong."

Journalism-school dropout Reed Kavner learned there's no such thing as a cheap lunch.

Chicago Tribune reporter Wailin Wong corrected bloggers.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Foul-mouthed, abusive, self-loathing Guardian gadfly Paul Carr made a joke as outdated as Wired editor Chris Anderson's economic theories.

Allegedly reformed White House press-corps lothario Jake Tapper reported on others' sleeping arrangements.

Jossip blogger Drew Grant took the Kal Penn news particularly hard.

Chicago Tribune food writer Monica Eng took her job a bit too seriously.

Rachel Sklar of Abrams Research hosted Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera on a trip east.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

SAI says that Wired.com was "gutted." We've heard the same, although exact numbers are hard to come by (we still hear 20 or so layoffs total). One layoff victim, we hear: Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney, who was once mistakenly fingered as the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, by Nick Denton.

There seems to be some feeling that Wired editor Chris Anderson protected his print side at the cost of his online team. Choosing sides is guaranteed to make somebody mad. If you know more, email us.

More than anyone, Google popularized the notion that free websites could be supported by advertising, touching off the insane Web 2.0 boom that led self-promoting social media marketers to overrun San Francisco and drove venture capitalists into fits of expensive madness. If Google could give away its Web searches, why couldn't, say, Ploorkle monetize its users' ploonks?

Google didn't just serve as an example. It actively funded the free-everything boom with its AdSense ads, matching keyword buys from advertisers with every last blog and Web app.

The Google-spread delusion of "free" as the perfect price infected such lofty minds as Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired who penned first a cover story and now a book due out in July on the subject.

What does it mean for the freetards, then, that Google is starting to charge left and right?

The latest and most notable price hike came today on Google Checkout. The credit-card processing service for online merchants will soon match PayPal's fees, which run as high as 2.9 percent of a transaction.

When Checkout launched, it offered free processing for stores which spent heavily on Google ads, with the notion that free payments would lure vendors away from Amazon.com and eBay. Google is eliminating the AdWords discount, making Checkout just another PayPal clone.

Google has also raised prices on its once-free hosted computing services for startups which don't want to bother running their own servers.

The hikes have mostly hit Google's business customers. But how long before Google will raise prices for, say, extra Gmail storage? How long before it spackles ads on services previously kept pristine, as it's already done with Google News?

The advent of ads to Google News is notable. Just last summer, Google VP Marissa Mayer argued that Google News made $100 million a year from the Web search traffic the site generated, and therefore didn't need its own ads. Looks like she lost that battle with the green-eyeshades brigade. YouTube, too, is burying its videos in every imaginable form of advertising.

Google is widely expected to announce disastrously bad results for its first quarter. Industry trade groups have cut their forecasts for search advertising, Google's mainstay. Rumors of layoffs are sweeping Google's Mountain View campus. And even Google's Pollyanna CEO, Eric Schmidt, admits that the economic situation is dire.

Far more than a temporary belt-tightening, the cutbacks are a far-reaching change in mindset. It's no longer okay to invent something new and figure out how to pay for it later, as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin once did. At today's Google, products must pay their own way, and with actual receipts, not business-model whiteboarding.

Who cares that that's not how Larry and Sergey did it? The billionaire founders are flying around the world somewhere on their private jets. The rest of Google has a business to run. And their paychecks don't come free.

Wired editor Chris Anderson lost his "sh*t".

Liverpudlian editrix Alison Gow lost her iPod.

Wall Street Journal reporter (and Gawker intern made good) Mary Pilon lost her sight.

Tech blogger Mark Drapeau lost his mind over "brad pudding." (Sounds delicious, depending on the Brad!)

Pregnant Guardian writer Jemima Kiss almost lost her lunch, before she even got it.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Outside.in chairman Steven Johnson, who is currently getting paid by venture capitalists to drink and promote his book, sparred with "I'm a PC" Apple ad star John Hodgman. (Actually, that is pretty awesome — the getting paid to drink part.)

Wired.com got hacked with the false report of a Steve Jobs heart attack. Wired editor Chris Anderson, who does not actually run his magazine's website because of Condé Nast's bizarre internal politics, pretended he was in charge, Al Haig-style.

Former Engadget editor Ryan Block fussed with his espresso maker.

Formerly important media person Bonnie Fuller stopped to wonder if she was rude. (Answer: Yes, but not because of that.)

Boing Boing space princess turned blogger Xeni Jardin coveted the BarackBerry.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

"I'm a PC" Apple spokesvillain John Hodgman couldn't decide which brand of speaker wire to buy.

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller was sorry she wasn't single while hitting the slopes.

AP reporter Phil Elliott wished he'd paid more attention to Tennyson in college.

Wired editor Chris Anderson was mad at himself for hiring the bunch of smartasses who ran a chart just to mock his "Long Tail" theory.

CNET News's Caroline McCarthy wished she hadn't said anything at all.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

Getting on the cover was nice and all, sure, but what Julia really wants is to write:

Actually, the true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work.

Fantastic idea, except for this: Can you recall a single piece of writing by Allison? No matter. Anderson can just hook up a competent reporter already in the Wired stable — we like Fred Vogelstein a lot — and have him write the articles for Allison. Slap her attention-getting byline on them, and done!

Or better yet, why not go with Allison's Plan B? At the end of her email to Anderson, she sighs that she could always go into marketing if the writing thing doesn't work out. Perfect. Chris, can you talk to the folks over on the business side and get Julia a job in Wired's marketing department? She already sounds like she's on it.

The story had been in the works for three or four months, said Cohn, long before Julia caught Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's attention with a marshmallow lollypop. "All the more reason she's eager to be photographed with him!" Cohn explains. "She was very good at her courtship, but we were already interested in using her as a case study for self-promotion."

There you have it: Both parties can feel they've smartly played the other. Wired can sit pretty with the increased Web traffic, and Julia gets the pony she always dreamed of: a national magazine cover! Her starter startup NonSociety.com, the ostensible news peg here, has nothing to do with it. Julia's blog business is a fig leaf for her most reliable product release: Julia Allison.

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?

The problem here is that if we stop asking the question "why?" then we are basically making for the foundations of faith. You can always make statistics say nearly anything you want, it simply depends on the assumptions you make when you analyze and present them. While Google's search algorithms are the best currently available, they are not infallible — if they were, then Google wouldn't have the advertising business that Anderson speaks so highly of, as people would find what they were looking for in the natural results.

It's a typical technocratic argument that privileges the rough trade in applied science over the pansy practice of theory. Applied science can be commercialized, and therefore profitable — pure, theoretical science much less so. The thinking goes that markets, those ruthlessly efficient arbiters of quantifiable value, don't need a priori hypotheses to make their judgments, so let's leave the thinking to machinations of mathematics and simply guess at the intent of the black box.

But by implying that you can simple toss aside causation is specious sophistry. Because when you stop asking "why" and only ask "what" and "how much" you're bound to lose a grip on strict rationality. As Schroedinger clearly demonstrated, the very act of measuring can affect the outcome of the measurement. Anderson should be careful what he wishes for — by putting faith in the invisible hand without modeling possible outcomes, we will get what the algorithm calculates we deserve, whether we like it or not. (Photo by Dave O)

• On former White House spokesmonkey Scott McClellan's new book, which won't be back in physical stock until June 9 but is still available on the Kindle for $9.99: "One of the great things about electronic books — they don't go out of stock."
• Regarding reading on a laptop, Bezos asserted, "You certainly can't curl up in bed with one." Actually, our laptop has been our most faithful sleeping partner in years.
• Playing up the Kindle's ability to look up definitions on the fly. "I have discovered my vocabulary is not nearly as good as I thought it was ... I was living in a nice fantasy world where my contextual guesses were accurate."
• Of the 125,000 titles available as both physical books and Kindle e-books, six percent of the sales go to Kindle. Some, including Bezos, buy both a physical copy and an electronic copy — presumably because a Kindle full of books doesn't telegraph just how smart you are.
• Anderson asked by what factor the number of titles available on Kindle would grow by next year in Bezos estimation. "I wouldn't be happy with 20 million. I'm hard to make happy. Bwahahahaha!" (Bezos' laugh is surprisingly deep and loud for such a small man).
• Like Amazon's offering of used copies alongside new copies, it didn't change the amount of original sales, only expanded, suggesting it's not a zero-sum game. "Most people bought as many books as they previously bought, and plus they buy Kindle books."
• Explaining Amazon's strategy of only offering print-on-demand titles printed through BookSurge in its shipping discounts, he said it's because it's cheaper to pack multiple purchases in one box — hence POD books must be printed at Amazon fulfillment centers to qualify.
• Early in the discussion with Bezos, Anderson kept turning the conversation towards his"long tail" theory. Eventually, Bezos caught on, expounding on how Amazon's whole business model was based on niche content availability being a differentiator — shrewdly buttering up Anderson while subtly claiming credit for the idea.