Yeah, I wasn't so sure about that regex either, but your previous suggestion of correcting Wired.com's claimed encoding to UTF-8 worked perfectly, didn't even have to search for the errant pattern and correct it. Hopefully this will fix all accented characters as well (they were showing up funny after the LRF conversion).
Version 0.7 now being put up on Kovid's Wiki for custom user profiles for web2lrf. It's alot easier to post the changes in just one place that way.
https://libprs500.kovidgoyal.net/wiki/UserProfiles
Apostrophe's fixed.
Dave