WIRED for the Moment

The lines between Silicon Valley and Washington have blurred beyond recognition, necessitating a news organization that is fluent in both worlds. That’s how WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond sees it, and it’s the guiding principle behind the magazine’s sharp, confrontational coverage of tech’s most powerful figures and institutions.

Under Drummond’s leadership, WIRED has gone directly at the Masters of the Universe, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos, treating them not as visionary entrepreneurs, but as political actors shaping the future of our democracy and civilization at large.

In a conversation with Status, Drummond explained why she does not believe WIRED can separate tech from authoritarianism, how her newsroom ensures its reporting is both hard-hitting and airtight, and why she believes adversarial journalism isn’t just essential to democracy, but is also good for business.

Below is our Q&A, lightly edited for style.

For readers who may not be following closely, how are you steering WIRED’s coverage of the technology sector in this extraordinary moment for both politics and Silicon Valley?

WIRED has always been about what’s around the corner, but I would best describe the WIRED of yesteryear as a chronicler (and too often a champion) of an industry that floated above the lowly theater of politics, or at least wanted to appear that way. But the jig is up. Combined, the tech industry and political leaders are the nexus of power in this country and around the world; that fact is of great consequence to every single person living in the kingdom they’re collectively ruling. From crypto to A.I. regulation, from DOGE to the TikTok ban. You can’t unravel it and disambiguate the tech from the politics anymore.

Ultimately, this era in history is a WIRED story: The United States’ authoritarian turn, aided and abetted by the tech industry’s complicity. And that’s how we’re covering it.

In many ways, it seems that your tech reporters are really now politics reporters too?

In a majority of cases, I think you have to understand and closely track politics to successfully cover the tech industry right now. Or science, or culture, or security, or consumer tech. Basically, you can’t report for WIRED without politics being relevant; at the very least, it should be contextualizing how you approach your beat.

How can someone cover, say, Meta, without understanding the broader context around A.I. regulation, lobbying, and Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA pivot? How can they write about consumer electronics without keeping close tabs on tariffs? How can they even start to write about climate change or health research without immediately veering into the Trump administration’s budget cuts or RFK Jr.’s anti-vax crusade? Very little for us is apolitical at this moment.

Do you think more mainstream news organizations are adequately covering the "Masters of the Universe," as we like to call them? I tend to think that these organizations are good at covering traditional centers of power, particularly Washington. But it seems that there isn't the same intensity of reporting from them on Silicon Valley, despite top figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding far more power than any member of Congress.

Imagine if outlets like The WaPo and POLITICO put the same number of reporters and resourcing against Silicon Valley as they do Washington, D.C. It’s absolutely necessary, and while there’s plenty of good mainstream reporting happening, it can never be enough. This is an industry worth trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. It is stunningly, world-bendingly powerful. The New York Times essentially covers the Trump White House and the American political apparatus with a rolling live-blog. Do the same thing for Silicon Valley, if you ask me.

Under your watch, WIRED has been quite aggressive in its reporting of Elon Musk. Given how litigious he is, how do you approach those stories? I'm sure your reporters give the Condé Nast lawyers some serious heartburn!

We love our lawyers here at WIRED, and they love us right back. In all seriousness, this is a ferocious newsroom of people who work incredibly hard, and are endlessly committed to getting the story. But ferocity needs to be tempered with diligence, and we take tremendous care in our reporting. Of course, we’re especially mindful when we know that a story or a reporting line is of particularly heightened risk.

We’re very intentional about having several layers of editors in our newsroom; a high-risk story will often go through three or four editors before it even hits my desk. We have a fantastic fact-checking team on-staff, which feels like a luxury in media these days, but is really a necessity in any newsroom. And of course, we have a legal team who are available seven days a week and at all hours of the day or night.

On the business end of the equation, with so many top journalists opting to launch their own independent ventures, how does Condé Nast and WIRED both retrain high-profile talent and attract them? And do you think traditional outlets need to offer more perks to journalists, such as revenue sharing, to keep competing with platforms like beehiiv/Substack and YouTube?

I’ll point to my above answer for some of this. Journalists at WIRED, who want to do high-risk and high-impact reporting, have access to the infrastructure that we and Condé Nast create and provide: rigorous editing, fact-checking, 24-7 legal and security support. Not to mention huge reach to get their journalism out into the world. In the two years that I’ve been running WIRED, that’s been a pretty compelling sales pitch to attract and retain top talent.

Could traditional outlets offer more in terms of incentive? On a case-by-case basis, sure. I’m very open to creative or mutually beneficial compensation depending on the circumstance. Ultimately, I think the pool of journalists who can make a substantial living independently is much smaller than the pool who want to be working as journalists—many of whom enjoy and appreciate being part of a larger newsroom. And if WIRED can be an incubator for talent who eventually leave to successfully do their own thing, I would count that as a win. I think these two ecosystems can co-exist.

A lot of more established outlets are shying away from hard-hitting, adversarial coverage in this moment. Instead, it seems there is a desire across the news industry to invest more in chasing softer/lifestyle content. What's the business case for the former?

As a reader, I love all kinds of stuff, lifestyle journalism included. But look: Your lifestyle content is going to be gobbled into a Large Language Model and spit back out as a bulleted list; your media company might get a few million bucks for a few years in licensing revenue. The business case for hard-hitting journalism and original news reporting is that an LLM can’t replicate it, and people who want to be informed about the world and where it’s going need to read it.

WIRED as a business success is a WIRED that people need to read on a daily basis. It needs to be indispensable. And our audience needs to pay for the value we create for them. As much as I appreciate and respect all kinds of journalism, I think that the value proposition of a subscription business built on original reporting and hard-hitting journalism is much more clear and much more future-proofed by its very nature.

Stepping back, what do you think it means for American democracy and for the tech sector when Silicon Valley leaders are openly bowing before Donald Trump? And, in an attempt to end on a positive note: Where, if anywhere, do you find reasons for optimism?

We’re witnessing, in real-time, a profound consolidation of power and collusion among political and tech elites—the ruling class of this country, and the world – wherein the tools and technologies that this industry has built, and continues to build, can now be deployed in service of an authoritarian regime. What happens when Trump decides he’s not so hot on TikTok’s algorithm showcasing Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms? Or when he really sinks his teeth into this notion of “woke A.I.”? How about when the Department of Homeland Security decides it needs even more surveillance power over American citizens?

Don’t think for a second that these companies and their executives won’t get in line. They’re already in the Oval Office with a custom glass and 24-karat-gold statuette, for god’s sake.

What gives me optimism? People in tech doing novel, subversive, transformational things—grassroots or otherwise. That, and my second passport.

The latest episode of our podcast, Power Lines, just dropped.

In this week’s episode: We break down Gavin Newsom’s trolling of Donald Trump with satire that Fox News couldn’t quite compute; newly unredacted Smartmatic documents show Fox hosts jockeying for Trump’s favor; MSNBC’s rebrand to “MS Now” sparks controversy; and we have new details on CNN’s forthcoming new streaming platform and broader digital play.

You can watch on YouTube—or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Data from Box Office Mojo]