industry trend was polarization between two styles of writing: popular criticism for mass-market consumers versus intellectual criticism for underground music connoisseurs. The Wire was certainly positioned on the "highbrow" end of the industry—even if, as editor Tony Herrington said, the magazine preferred "intelligence to intellectualism". Its embrace of high-minded, literate criticism aligned it with publications such as New Statesman, a politics and culture magazine that started to publish pieces by rock journalists, and Melody Maker, which had hired a group of academically oriented new writers like Simon Reynolds who were influenced by post-structuralism. The Wire contrasted most sharply in approach with Q, which emphasised celebrity personalities and the classic-rock canon. The Wire was among the major British music magazines of the 1990s, a decade that represented an overall peak for the print magazine industry before the next two decades brought the rise of digital journalism and a general decline in print readership. However, The Wire has held a steady circulation and remained in print even as other magazines that once sported much larger circulations have folded or become online-only titles. NME once sold 300,000 weekly copies at its peak in the 1970s, but by 2016 it only sold 20,000—the same number The Wire sold at that time—and in March 2018 NME ended its print edition altogether. The Wire was considered one of the most significant independently owned publications covering the musical underground in the 2000s, alongside Fact, Rock-A-Rolla, Dusted and innumerable blogs. 1982: Founding as a jazz magazine The Wire debuted as a quarterly jazz magazine in the summer of 1982. The magazine was co-founded by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. Lacking office space, Wood and Murray prepared the first issues of the magazine from an Italian restaurant on St Martin's Lane. The staff sold copies of the first issue to concert-goers at a jazz festival in Knebworth and at the Camden Jazz Festival. At that time, Germany was considered the cultural centre of jazz in Europe—especially European free jazz. There was greater cultural appreciation for jazz in Germany than in Britain and a greater volume of dedicated press coverage, even though the British jazz scene was actually larger. In an introductory essay explaining the magazine's editorial policy and scope, Wood wrote that The Wire intended to target the demographic of listeners under the age of 25, who he felt were poorly served by the state of