Nov. 29, 2017 7:00 a.m. ET Wired Editor in Chief Nick Thompson speaks onstage at the WIRED Business Conference in June 2017. Photo: Getty Images for Wired

Wired Editor in Chief Nick Thompson has done a lot of strange things in the name of journalism. He has been abducted by drug dealers, eaten ants and begrudgingly paid $60 for a cold fish head.

But lately, he has been thinking about a tougher challenge: building a digital future for a magazine about the future of digital.

Wired is planning to introduce a paywall in January, part of a business and editorial reboot that Mr. Thompson says will help protect the 24-year-old tech title as print revenue in the magazine industry continues to decline.

Wired has not yet set a price for its paywall, Mr. Thompson said, but he expects it will cost less than a Spotify Premium subscription, which runs $9.99 a month. The paywall will be metered, but the magazine, which is owned by Condé Nast, has not yet finalized how many articles visitors will be able to read for free each month.

“The simple reason that we’re going to a paywall model is that I think it’s going to make money, and I’d like us to make more money,” Mr. Thompson said. “The deeper reason we’re going to a paywall model is because you need to hedge against the future.”

Encouraging readers to pay for quality journalism is something of a passion project for Mr. Thompson, 42, who said his plan has been to install a paywall at Wired since he started as editor in January. When he was editor of NewYorker.com, the site—also owned by closely held parent company Condé Nast—launched a successful paywall in 2014.

Condé Nast executives say the online subscription models at the New Yorker and Wired may be followed by paywalls at its other properties as the magazine industry undergoes profound changes, with ongoing declines in print revenue and heightened competition for digital advertising. The upheaval has led other publishers to look for the exits this year, including Rolling Stone pursuing a sale, Time Inc. getting acquired by Meredith Corp., and Rodale Inc. selling to Hearst.

As Google and Facebook gobble up an ever-larger share of digital advertising, publications are increasingly turning to their online audiences to help bear the burden of paying for journalism. Digital-native publications such as Business Insider have launched paywalled content, mirroring steps taken years ago by print publications such as The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“What happened as each of the publishing companies went through their digital transformation is people went to the ad model at scale pretty quickly,” said Bob Sauerberg, chief executive of Condé Nast. “But If you have distinct content that is unique and special, there’s a massive trend toward subscription-based businesses.”

Wired, which is profitable, is tapping into consumers’ growing willingness to pay for premium content, Mr. Sauerberg said, citing an uptick in subscriptions at major newspapers and music streaming services. Condé Nast, which also publishes Vanity Fair and Vogue, is exploring digital paywalls for other publications next year, he said.

Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s artistic director who oversees all of its magazines, said the company is exploring paid content “across all the titles.” She called the decision to launch a paywall at Wired a “no-brainer,” in part because of Mr. Thompson’s success at the New Yorker.

New subscriptions via NewYorker.com were up 72% for the 10 months through October 2017, compared with the same period three years earlier, according to a spokeswoman for the New Yorker. A digital-only subscription to the New Yorker costs about $90 a year, while a print and digital bundled version runs $120 a year—up from $60 for digital or print and $70 for the bundle in 2014.

“To me what’s so interesting today is that we have so many avenues through which to put our content,” Ms. Wintour said. “Print is part of that. But we have the opportunity to reach our audiences in so many ways.”

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The paywall is part of a broader remaking of Wired, the magazine founded in 1993 that has chronicled the rise of the internet and helped coin now-common tech jargon like “the long-tail” and “crowdsourcing.”

Mr. Thompson says he’s focusing on making the magazine a destination for tech obsessives, steering it away from more general-interest stories and doubling down on articles about “forces that are turning society upside-down” like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and automation. By doing so, he hopes to appeal to hard-core readers and increase the incentive to subscribe.

“Us focusing on a slightly more narrow, deep look at technology ties into what people have always thought of as the best of Wired,” he said.

Wired’s print circulation is down nearly 5% from 2014, averaging almost 874,000 copies as of June 30 this year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Newsstand sales, which account for a fraction of its circulation, have fallen, while subscriptions have increased slightly.

Also under way is an incremental overhaul of the Wired.com, which was last redesigned in 2015. In addition, the magazine recently rolled out an affiliate linking business through which Wired will receive a cut of revenue made from sales on products that the magazine recommends. Wired magazine to launch a paywall as a ‘hedge against the future’

Wired magazine plans to introduce a metered paywall in January, which may precede online subscriptions at other Condé Nast publications
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