No, Wired does not owe you an apology.
If there's one charming detail about the political bloggers at the Huffington Post, it's their knee-jerk righteous anger. Eric Boehlert dismisses Wired Magazine's Al Gore cover story (complete with hero cover shot) as a "make-good" for a little incident in '99. Way back then, Wired News quoted Al Gore's "inventing the Internet" line, sparking (according to Boehlert) that whole PR debacle. So the HuffPo writer writes, "Wired Owes Al Gore an Apology."
No it doesn't.
Look, everyone gets mixed up about this one time or another, but Wired News is not the same as Wired Magazine. The news outlet has been separate from Wired Ventures for eight years now, only sharing a domain (and choice cooperative promos) with its namesake. Even before Lycos bought Wired Digital in 1998, the two outlets never even shared a building, according to long-time journalist Owen Thomas.
Granted, the shared domain could confuse anyone — Wired News is at Wired.com, Wired Magazine at Wired.com/Wired. And back when tech media outlets were trying to go public, Wired's IPO planned to include both ventures. But one would hope Boehlert, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and author of a book on the press's treatment of Bush, would know just a touch more about his subject when going into a public rant. But hey, whatever — he's just a blogger.
