Shortly after becoming Wired’s global editorial director in 2023, Katie Drummond acted on an early-morning idea. With a presidential election coming, the tech-focused news outlet needed a team to report on technology’s intersection with politics.
She couldn’t have predicted how much the decision would pay off.
Wired has attracted broad attention for its aggressive coverage of the Trump administration, particularly Elon Musk’s efforts at reducing federal employment. It has identified and traced the backgrounds of Musk’s young team and how they are burrowing their way into government operations.
“I think we were very well positioned to jump on that coverage,” Drummond said.
Wired gained 62,500 new subscribers in the United States during the first two weeks of February alone. Last year it reported a total of 19.5 million subscribers, either digital or for the monthly printed magazine, or both. Its eight global editions reach 57 million total.
When Wired set up a Zoom call for subscribers to talk with its journalists about their stories earlier this month, more than 1,000 people signed up, Drummond said.
“This is what adversarial journalism looks like,” media critic Parker Molloy wrote on her blog, “The Present Age.” “Instead of just transcribing what powerful people say, Wired’s reporters dig into what they’re actually doing. They tracked down documents, spoke with sources inside agencies, and pieced together how Musk’s takeover is actually working in practice.”
Drummond stressed that Wired isn’t part of any resistance. It’s just reporting. “This is all newsworthy, highly-consequential information,” she said. “This is not information that is being disseminated in a transparent way.”
Initially, [Drummond] said she was surprised that it took other news organizations some time to concentrate on the type of stories that Wired was writing, although the flood of news during the first month of the Trump administration has been hard to keep up with. She said she was excited to see others eventually jump in.