How to Reinvent a Magazine, with Wired’s Katie Drummond
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This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent and business insider. And today we're talking about how you take a media property that's been around for a long time before the internet and find a way to bring in new eyeballs and new revenue. That property is Wired.com.

the place that told you about the internet before the internet even existed. And the person who's reviving it is Katie Drummond, who's been running the property for a couple of years. And as we discussed, Wired has always done interesting and important work.

But when Katie got to it, she had a plan to inject it with new life. And it turns out that this plan had Wired perfectly situated to thrive during the Trump 2.0 slash Elon slash Doge era, which, by the way, we are still in. This is a great conversation. You're going to love it. So let's get right to it. This is me talking to Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond.

I'm here with Katie Drummond. Katie Drummond, tell us your title at Wired so I don't get it wrong. Peter, I am the global editorial director of Wired. That sounds very fancy and borg-y and severancy. I think of you as the editor of Wired. I am. I mean, I am the editor-in-chief of Wired.

When Condé Nast, and this is just my understanding of recent history, when Condé Nast globalized several years ago, well before I joined the company, editors-in-chief who had global remits, right, so they oversaw the brand in different markets, their titles changed to global editorial director. So that is my title now. Obviously, we operate Wired in the U.S. and the U.K. That's our English language Wired, but we also have Wired Japan, Wired Italy, and Wired en Español. You sound like someone who knows the Condé Nast world.

line well. So good job. Well, I do my best to represent the company. You came to Wired in 2023, long illustrious career. Before that, I'm just going to hit some highlights here because you work basically everywhere. You started at Wired. Did you start? I did. I was an intern. I was Noah Shachtman's intern at Danger Room. And then The Verge. Yes. Bloomberg. And then The

There was a Josh Topolsky through line there. Medium, Vice, and then Wired in 2023. And then Wired. Illustrious is very kind of you. I remember actually, Peter, when I joined the Outline, Josh was trying to get media coverage of my appointment as executive editor. And he reached out to you and convinced you to write a story. And then you called me to get a quote. And you said... Oh, no. He said...

I just want to manage expectations here. You know, this isn't going to be like a long story. This is maybe a paragraph or two. And I was like, thank you. It's so nice to be acquainted. Did I deliver? Yeah, I think you wrote a paragraph or two for Recode. It was very nice of you. See, I still want to get to some world where I can write one paragraph long stories. It's all you need.

I'd like to do more of that. I mean, that used to be called Twitter. Or a blog. Yeah, or a blog. I do want to talk to you about your career, but I'm mostly interested in what you're doing at Wired and how you transformed the place. And the thing that caught my eye, like many other people's eyes, I've been reading, obviously, the coverage Wired's been doing for a long time. Thank you.

Oh, well, thank you. ...for a long time and really appreciated all the coverage you've been doing of the Trump administration and the Elon administration. And then you had this news item in, I think it was February, saying in two weeks alone, you guys had added 62,500 subscribers. And I thought...

That's got to be a typo. No. That's 600 or maybe 6,000 because publications don't add 60,000 subscribers. So that's really what I want to talk to you about is what are you doing? Why are people responding to it? How did all that happen? So I'm assuming that there is a real basic answer for 62,000 people signing up in February, which is...

The answer, by and large, is that our politics coverage and specifically the coverage we started doing around the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk and his involvement in the Trump administration drove just colossal audiences to Wired. I mean, it was...

And I've worked, as you said, a distinguished career. I mean, I would disagree with the distinguished part, but career in digital media. So I've seen a lot of chart beats and a lot of parcelies and a lot of traffic. I've never seen anything like what we saw in February and March around that coverage. So that was the by and large, that was where the subscription came.

Because in 2016, lots of people, anyone that put Trump in a headline, especially in the beginning of 2017, saw enormous interest. And then we knew about the Trump bump for some publications.

There was a lot of sort of wise and people saying, well, there won't be a Trump bump this time around. Everyone's exhausted. Were you surprised to see that level of interest? And not just interest, right? It's people taking out a credit card and giving your bosses money. Yeah. No. And we weren't expecting it, to be totally honest. I think I've worked in digital media long enough to just always expect something.

the worst or just the status quo. Obviously, I'm always pushing for something transformational, but we weren't expecting that. I think, though, that where the real surprise for me came from, and I think where this outsized audience interest came from, is that I remember the first couple weeks of February, late January, early February, we started covering Doge. We started covering it really hard, like several stories a day, every single day, seven days a week, week after week. And after like a week, I sort of looked around and

And was like, where is everyone else? Why aren't other news organizations covering this? Like, did I miss a memo? It was a little flat-footed, right? Did I miss, like, a signal group text about, like, how we're all not going to do this? And I think that us having sort of first-mover advantage on that story meant that for a lot of people just out there in the world trying to figure out what was going on, they saw Wired doing this coverage as,

They looked at everybody else and sort of felt like, where is the rest of the media on this? And so a lot of the feedback we got from readers on social media or directly to our inboxes was, thank you so much for doing this coverage that nobody else seems willing to do. I'm now a subscriber. So I think it was that kind of first mover advantage that audiences saw, oh, Wired is doing something different here and Wired is really going for it. That's a very brave thing to do.

I'm giving them my money. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say that it was brave. I would say that like that's the job. Did you feel like some of what you some of the people who are subscribing were subscribing in the way that people subscribe to The Times in 2016 and 2017 as like you guys are doing? I'm sure you don't want to be called resistance journalism, but you are fighting the good fight. I am signaling with my credit card that I like what you're doing. I'm against Donald Trump slash Elon Musk.

Yeah, I mean, certainly you're right. I don't want to be called resistance journalism. But I think, again, it was people looking for answers and trying to understand, like, what is going on inside of these federal agencies? This seems really wild and really troubling and really disturbing. There was certainly, of course, we get sort of anti-Trump sentiment in our inboxes or from some of our readers and subscribers. But it was so it was less about anti-Trump and more just like,

Thank you for giving us answers and information. Thank you for giving me information about what is happening inside the government of my own country. Like, I appreciate that. So I can, on the one hand, I can sort of see why you guys would be positioned for this coverage because Elon Musk is there.

big tech guy, you're a tech publication. Don't really think of Wired as a political publication. And even if you covered politics, I'm sure you know that you have covered politics in the past. I didn't think of Wired as a place I would turn to to learn what's going on inside government agencies.

So how did you end up positioned for that? Yeah. I mean, I think if you don't think of Wired as an outlet that covers politics, you should start thinking differently, first of all. But I would say that when I took the job, so this was sort of September 2023, I looked ahead at 2024. There was going to be obviously a very consequential U.S. federal election. There was also a record number of elections being held around the world.

And looking at sort of all of the different factors at play, obviously Elon Musk was not top of mind for me then, but generative AI was top of mind. Disinformation, I assume. That was sort of everyone's concern was, well, we've seen this in the past. The platforms aren't going to be ready for it. It's only going to be supersized. We're going to have a wave of misinformation, disinformation. Yeah, exactly. No one's going to trust the results. With that and then, you know, the potential for more sort of hacking and sort of foreign interference in elections, it's

It felt to me like, oh, there are so many different ways

intersections, not to use that word, but with technology and with what we cover, we need to position ourselves now so that going into 2024, we're ready to cover all of that. And again, I was thinking AI, I was thinking mis- and disinformation, I was thinking hacking, but I made a pitch to the company that I needed to build out a politics team. They were very receptive, very supportive. So by the end of 2023, we had that team in place, we started doing the coverage, and then obviously sort of midway through 2024, we

Our focus changed when Trump was, you know, grazed in the ear by a bullet. Elon Musk endorsed him.

And it very quickly turned into a very different kind of story. And I think one where we were able to bring a lot of expertise to bear around Elon Musk and sort of the tech industry, how they think, how they operate. And then moving forward to Doge, it really was. I remember Zoe Schiffer, who's our director of business coverage, you know, she wrote a book about what happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

And she sort of said, like, this is going to be the Musk playbook. When he goes into a company, this is what he does. I think this is what we're about to see inside the federal government. And so we positioned ourselves to cover it through that lens and in that way. And then when we're talking about sort of what's happening or what has happened inside these agencies...

I think so much of how we were able to differentiate ourselves is that Wired is really good at sort of like the technological nitty gritty, like really getting into like systems and AI and how does this actually work? And so when we're talking to a source about technology,

What's happening inside the U.S. Treasury and their payment systems? What is the difference between read access to a system and write access? We're talking to engineers, technologists within the federal government. We can understand that. You have native speakers. Yeah, and we can translate that for our audience. So it sort of ended up being this perfect collision. The Doge coverage was sort of this perfect collision of

politics expertise, business expertise, and then sort of like systems expertise, like AI expertise. And we have all of that on staff. And so I think we were able to just pull everyone from across different teams and come out with like a really good report, like a really good day-to-day. Did you have to go to people who you'd hired because they were misinformation, disinformation experts, or that was a focus and said, the stuff that you really care about and that we thought was going to be really important here is...

much less so, and we want you to do this instead? Yeah. I mean, maybe framed a little bit differently than that. They care about it for good reason. We want them to keep those skills sharp, right? We need to be able to be nimble and versatile. But Wired is a relatively small staff, right?

And on that reporting, I mean, we're competing with every other outlet on the planet once they were able to kind of get up to speed. So we did have, I mean, David Gilbert is a great example. He's a fantastic mis- and disinformation reporter. That's what he specializes in. But this conversation was sort of like, David, we're going to direct you over here for now. We need you to start getting on the phone with people inside federal agencies because that's the story. So we were doing that across all of our different teams. Yeah.

It's Elon Musk for whatever reason. I'm assuming directly that a Tesla stock is much less visible than he was at the beginning of the year. Doge is still obviously an ongoing story, but doesn't seem to command the same kind of attention. Do you expect that a story like this, reader interest, is going to flag over time? And how do you think about it?

If that's the case, bringing in people who gave you money in February because they cared about Doge and what was happening, how do you keep them engaged in May and October? Yeah, no, that's a great question. It's something that we think about and talk about all the time. I think for one thing, you're exactly right. The Tesla stock price and Elon Musk announcing that he was stepping back from Doge happened last.

Quite close together in terms of timeline. So it's certainly sort of an optics move on his part and on the part of the Trump administration. That said, you know, Doge is now fully embedded inside the federal government. It's not going away. Yeah. So the audience numbers on those stories now are not revolutionarily good. They're still very good. And I think that our mandate there is to continue promoting.

covering that as long as it is a consequential beat, an area of focus for us, we're going to stay on it. I mean, I think that there will be more really big stories and really consequential stories to come out of what they are doing inside these agencies. But then in terms of sort of that community that we've built and all of those subscribers that we've added,

I think now the challenge for us is to introduce them to the rest of Wired, right, and to what we have to offer and to create new opportunities for them to really sort of like get to know Wired and get to know our journalists. So we're working on all sorts of things. I mean, we do and have been experimenting since late last year with these live stream AMAs, right, where subscribers can sign up. They join a live stream with Wired journalists. They can ask questions. Our journalists answer them. I mean, we have thousands of people who sign up and join those. And so I think that's a really... It's a mega Zoom call.

Yeah, it's a mega Zoom call. I mean, it's controlled. It's like a contained environment, but it gives them a chance to sort of go back and forth with our reporters on different subjects. So I think that's one example of how we are trying to, and this was the idea before the Doge reporting really took off, was to build wired subscribers into more of a community and create less of sort of a transactional back and forth and more of just an engagement and a back and forth around the journalism and the journalists. Do you have any sense whether that stuff like numerically is helping you with things like churn?

Is it a gut right now or can you actually measure it? And similarly, I'm assuming that those people who were signing up in February, new to Wired, are more likely to churn than someone who's been with you for a while. Interestingly, and again, I would say it's May now. We saw this big boom sort of February, March. It's still, I mean, our subscriber rates week to week, our conversion rates are still way higher than they were last year and the year before. But our churn has gone way, way, way down.

So among that new set of subscribers, we're seeing churn rates that are vastly, vastly lower than what we were seeing in subscribers who signed up like a year ago or a year and a half ago, which is interesting. But again, it's only May, right? So we need to give that time. I don't know, man. It sounds like you solved the whole thing. You solved publishing. This interview is done. Congratulations. I don't know. I don't know. I wake up every day assuming that I have not, which I think is a pretty safe way to operate in 2025 in media. Yeah.

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So let's work backwards a bit. You got this job in 2023. You'd been a big editorial boss at Vice before that. Were you sure you wanted to be in publishing after Vice in that era? Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, at a superficial level, day to day, like, no. I mean, of course, I would talk and joke about leaving media all the time. I think anyone who works in this industry jokes about it. But I actually remember...

When I was interviewing for the job at Wired, I interviewed with David Remnick, which was a terrifying experience for me then. I've gotten to know him since, and so I'm not scared of him anymore. Really? Yeah, I'm not scared of him. No, he's wonderful. But in this interview, I was terrified. And he said, well, if you weren't a journalist, what would you do? And...

I just went completely blank, like blackout level. And I said, well, I don't know. I think I would be a massage therapist. And he just looked at me like, who are you? Like, what is wrong with you? But reflecting on that answer, I mean, part of it was just panic at being asked that by David Remnick. But I think part of it is that

I don't know what I would do. I don't want to be a massage therapist. There's I think some of it is just like there's nothing else that I can do. Like, I love what I do, even though it's a nightmare. I love it. What was the Wired pitch to you? Why did they reach out to you? And what was your pitch to them coming in? Well, let's make one thing clear here, Peter. When I saw that this job was opening.

I emailed Anna Wintour. I got her email address, which is pretty easy to figure out, but I got her email address and I emailed her and I was like, I want this job. It turns out other people had recommended me for the job. So it all sort of came together. But look, the pitch to me was we think that this is a moment where Wired can be really prominent. We really believe in the brand. We think that from an editorial point of view and a financial point of view, there's a lot of opportunity there.

So that's a very diplomatic way of saying something that I could say differently. Something's broken we need to fix. Which I love. I love problems and I love to solve them. And so I think what they saw in Wired was opportunity that had not been fully realized. And that was the pitch to me. And they were very honest about that. But they didn't need to protect me from that because that's why I went running towards the job. Like that's what I wanted.

And did you have – did you come in saying, here is my prescription for what ale is wired? Yes. Oh, yeah. What was it? It was –

We got to move faster. We need to be way more nimble. We need to get into covering news in a really aggressive way. Wired on a daily basis needs to be indispensable. This is not a moment where you can say, oh, we have our little print magazine. We do our magazine. There's a magazine that predates predates the Web, right? It's like 1992. Oh, yes. And this is a 32 year old publication at this point. And was early to the Web, but wasn't a place you went day to day for news coverage.

Absolutely not. I mean, it was it really they had really positioned themselves by and large as a story breaks. And a few days later, we'll have a really smart analysis piece. And guess what? Nobody waits two or three days to read really smart analysis on the internet. That is not how this works. And so I just felt like if this is a publication that's all about the future about where things are going.

We need to be thinking about ourselves as the place covering the story before anyone else knows that there's a story there. Like we need to be first. We need to be better than first. We need to compete and we need to win. And that's I mean, that's what I do. Like I'm a news journalist in like a very

unfortunate way for my stress levels and personal life. But that's what I do. And that's what I pitched to Roger and to Anna and to David was just like news. We need to break news. And to be clear, too, I think it's important to note that, look, there was a lot of opportunity for Wired to get a lot better.

But there was a very deep bench of talent at Wired. Like, it's a very good newsroom. You did not come in and clean house. I mean, I certainly made staffing changes. Yes, but you didn't, like, get... You didn't replace the entire staff with entirely new staff. No, there's incredible talent there. I mean, Wired's security coverage, just to give you one example, which is run by Andrew Kautz, and it's a team of four or five reporters who are collectively, like, the best security reporters on the planet. And they've been doing incredible work for a very long time. And to some extent, it was about...

Really supporting and leaning into the coverage areas that were already great and then pushing every other vertical to meet that bar, like to be that good. And I think we've made a ton of progress in that regard. I mean, I'm so proud of what we put out every day. There's always room for improvement. I mean, I will always be tinkering and tweaking what we do, but...

But I think that we've gotten there in terms of like, are we breaking news every day? Yeah. Yeah, we are. When you come in to tell Anna Wintour and David Remnick, I'm going to fix this for you. We're going to pivot to news. David certainly, I assume Anna as well, knows that you probably are thinking, I need to hire a bunch of people who can do news, which means you have to hire people. I'm also assuming that.

Part of their plan was you're going to come in and make cuts because we need to run this thing at more – this thing needs to be leaner. Were those two things in conflict?

No. I mean, look, I am very motivated by really, really compelling journalism. And I'm very, very motivated by the idea and the necessity of building a sustainable business. Like that, you're right. I worked at Vice. I ran that newsroom through the bankruptcy. I ran the newsroom at Gawker Media through that bankruptcy. I mean, it's...

I don't want to do that again. I refuse to do that again. And so coming in, it really was about how do we produce the best possible journalism on a daily basis, but also have a P&L that looks really good at the end of the year because I need that. Like, I need that just to keep, with all due respect to Condé Nast corporate, like,

I would like them to stay off my back. Like, I want to run my business. I want to run my newsroom. I don't want someone knocking on my door. So I was very motivated myself just coming in to look at what we were spending money on, where resources were allocated and figure out what's a more effective way to do this. And I think I was able to do that without a lot of pain because I just think that Wired, for a variety of reasons, but there were just resources allocated in ways that I didn't think were

were in the best interest of the publication going into the year 2024. It's like, why are we putting all this money into a print magazine? Like, print is great. I want a wired subscriber to get that magazine in the mail and feel like they got something really special. Does it need to be on the nicest paper anyone has ever touched? No. Like, we can save some money on paper. Like, there were lots of opportunities to find resources, and we put a lot of money into news. Like, we really invested, I mean,

I mean, high six figures amounts of money into the newsroom part of Wired. And it's Conde. I mean, most of the publishers were this way for a while. Definitely Conde because that was sort of the Vox Media model for a while. It was going to be the Conde of digital. But the idea was really disparate. All the publications were their own fiefdoms. Everyone sort of got to do their own thing. Very little sharing resources beyond sort of the most basic sort of like HR stuff. Right.

My sense is that Condé in general has consolidated. I think David Remnick still gets to do his thing, but everyone else sort of has to be in the big pool and fight for resources. Was that happening while you got there or before you got there?

The consolidation, the fighting. Yeah. Well, just the we're all going to use shared resources now and you don't get to be off in San Francisco doing whatever you want. Yeah. No, I think that they went through a lot of that when they globalized and they sort of moved certain resources into like a centralized repository. I think that

That dance and all of whatever drama there was, I didn't experience that. I sort of walked into a situation that was pretty fully set up. I mean, they ultimately sort of, I think, three months into my tenure, they moved video and audience development out of that centralized pool and sort of back into the brands, which I think was a great move and has been really productive and really positive. And I think for me, with a background in digital, it would have been very hard to...

imagine not overseeing digital video and audience development as part of my remit. So I think that they've sort of, you know, they went all the way in one direction and I think they've sort of found equilibrium somewhere in the middle. Were there any moves that you made that surprised them? You said, well, I want to do news. And they said, okay, we'll do that. Were there other moves where you said, I'm going to do this? And they said, well, you didn't, we didn't expect that. Or why do you want to do that?

No, I wish I had a more interesting answer for you. And again, I'm not paid to be a Condé Nast spokesperson. I mean, maybe in some respects I am, but I don't. I think you are.

I didn't know how they would react to that. They have been incredibly supportive of all of that. I don't think anything I've done has surprised them in a bad way yet, but it's only been a year and a half. I'm curious about your take on sort of tech and journalism in general, particularly

For a long time, the coverage tech got was fawning. It was a niche. It was definitely considered a niche industry. I think long after it wasn't a niche industry, but I definitely remember talking to people at the New York Times. They had like basically one person in Silicon Valley like in 2007, like just crazy. It was undercovered.

2016, pendulum shifts, coverage becomes much, much more critical. And a lot of people in tech are unhappy still about that. And I think you'll still hear them complaining about it. I do hear them complaining. It's hard to tell how much of that is like Marc Andreessen and 10 other people versus a meaningful number of people in tech. But what's your sense of one, how

how tech sees journalism broadly and how Wired's readership expects you guys to cover tech. How tech sees journalism. I mean, I think with a degree of dismay and surprise, I think that one of the things that has been interesting for me is, you know, I always try to operate in good faith. We endeavor to be fair. We endeavor to tell the truth. The idea that

tech is this sort of like rogue grassroots element poised to transform the world for the better. It's inherently good. That was the wired sort of mindset in 1993. Absolutely. Like if tech is involved, it will be better. Tech is in opposition to the old and by default, by definition, it's better.

Yeah, but those sort of like visionary rascals from the 90s are now running billion and trillion dollar companies, right? They're not the good guys anymore. But there has been a degree of sort of surprise directed at me from the tech industry when they see Wired do something that maybe feels adversarial to them or that feels like it challenges sort of the premise upon which their companies are built or their industry is built.

Which makes sense, given Wired's history. I think you need to be pretty naive or really sort of have your head up your ass to work in tech and look around and be like, but wait, wait, wait, like, we're the good guys. Like, it's all good over here. I mean, that's nuts. But yes, I mean, I think there is sort of broadly speaking a degree of dismay and surprise from the tech industry in terms of how they are treated by journalists, how they see themselves as being treated. I think with regards to Wired, yeah.

By and large, we have had a very supportive audience through all of the coverage that we have done. I think if anything, I get a lot of pushback from our audience when they feel like we give the industry a pass, if they feel like we do a story that is too generous or that doesn't really sort of like interrogate the audience.

a tech company's statements sort of at face value or on their premise. I think audiences want something deeper. They don't want a superficial look at this company or that company anymore. They really want to know what is happening inside that company and how is it going to change my life, whether that's for the better or for the worse. And we try to make good on that ask of our audience. I mean, there are, of course, the people who, you know, I get emails like,

I've been a subscriber to Wired since 1993, and I am unsubscribing today because I could not be more disappointed that you had the audacity to publish XYZ's story about artificial intelligence or whatever it may be. And that will push them over the edge. But I'm really focused on building this audience of right now and this audience of the future. And if that means letting go of some of that audience who might be happier today.

reading something else, that's okay. That's fine. Did you get that pushback specifically around Doge coverage as well? Because I would encounter a lot of folks who I think incredibly naively said, this is

You know, forget your Elon hate, but this, you know, bringing, you know, reforming government, bringing the technological know-how of Silicon Valley to an ossified institution like Washington should be a good thing. And so why not let these guys get a chance? And also, why are you making fun of this 19-year-old? I mean, he's a 19-year-old. Don't you want the best of the brightest? I hear a lot of that. I'm assuming you did as well. A little bit. The Doge coverage was interesting because I think we expected more pushback.

It felt to me, and certainly we got some, but it felt to me like what was happening with Doge sort of transcended party lines in some respects with regards to the feedback that we got. It sort of felt like it was, it almost became like apolitical as a phenomenon that was really reshaping the country in a way that I think a lot of people, whoever they voted for, were surprised and distressed by. I think that the bigger pushback we got actually was

When we really went into politics, when I sort of built out that team and we started doing the coverage, and then it was as Trump and Harris were head-to-head and we were running up to the election, I published a couple of editor's letters, including one that just outright said, you know, Wired would like to see Kamala Harris win the election, and this is why. Because this is how we think that her administration will create a better future for all of us compared to Trump. How did you feel compelled to write an editor's letter? You know, it...

It just felt like the right thing to do. I think that what I believe in, and I think journalists and news outlets are accused of bias all day long. It's like a constant thing. And it's so often a bad faith argument. So I think my feeling generally has just been, let's just be honest with the audience. Let's just tell them where we are. These are our values. This is what we believe in. And so this is the candidate who we think best represents those values. That's it. And then you can read our coverage through whatever lens you want.

But we're just going to be upfront with you and tell you what we think. So that was sort of where I was coming from and where the newsroom was coming from. I would say the most negative feedback I got was from that and sort of in the couple of months running up to the election as Musk was getting really involved. Was it your stance or that you had a stance?

It was both. It was both. And it was particularly people saying, you know, a combination of Trump and Elon Musk in the White House could be an incredibly powerful thing. How dare you? Da da da da da. And it's like, OK, well, we're just going to go make some phone calls and cover the news. Like I but but now you know what we think. This is what we think. We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for the show comes from Mercury.

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And we're back.

After the election, there was a lot of up through the February, March of this year, there was a lot of there's been a vibe shift generally in the country. And there's a whole discussion about the Silicon Valley vibe shift. And one question I just genuinely don't have an answer for is we keep talking about Elon Musk and like 10 other people who are aligned with Elon Musk, who are publicly saying stuff. And they're the stand-ins for the vibe shift. And it's hard for me to understand why.

how broad and deep that is. When I talk to people who weren't famous over the last couple of years, there was definitely a pushback against DEI and sort of HR that people felt was sort of slowing them down. It didn't seem as political. It's just sort of a pendulum swing. Do you feel like there is a meaningful vibe shift in tech?

I do, but not insofar as all of a sudden all of these executives and technologists are backing Trump and Musk. I think the vibe shift for me and with a degree of dismay has been the silence of it all. I think we're hearing from Elon Musk and a few very outspoken people because everybody else,

is lobbying behind the scenes in the interests of their companies, but they are not interested or inclined to go on the record and talk about what they actually think of what the administration is doing. So I think the vibe shift has been one of maybe fear and sort of quiet, opportunistic behavior. I think a recognition that this time around it

it's serious and that they need to figure out how to work with this administration. But I think in some instances, I mean, I think Sam Altman and OpenAI are a great example of this. I mean, they see a great deal of opportunity in working with the Trump administration. And so they are out there actively collaborating, getting these billions of dollars, right, building out infrastructure in the United States to support their business. Someone who actively was saying, I mean, it was, you know, again, on the record saying Donald Trump's a cancer, blah, blah, blah, and now has to say, oh, I got it wrong. Yes. And it's transparent what he's doing, but he still has to say it.

Yeah. So I think it's sort of on a spectrum of silence and sort of quiet exasperation and a, OK, I guess this is the next four years. Let's just keep our heads down and keep our mouths closed to. Well, but there's real opportunity in this because the Biden administration was a regulatory nightmare for us. We can really make inroads here. So let's go. So that's still the boss class, right? Do you feel like sort of the worker bees? Yeah.

people who actually keep the place running, do they care one way or the other? Do they kind of don't want to be in politics anyway? I think it's a lot of that. I mean, I think just from conversations that I have, and again, this is anecdotal. I don't have sort of like a professionalized survey that I've done, but I think there's a real sense of

Let's just keep our heads down. Keep working. I want to keep my job. I'm not really interested in getting into it. I mean, there are obviously many exceptions to that rule, but I would say the sort of dominant attitude I get is like,

Yeah. I mean, the Trump thing, it's crazy, but like, I got to go to work. Yeah. I got a ticket. My equity hasn't bested yet. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking to you in the studio here in New York. It's also where you live. You cover industry that's based in California. Are you on a plane a lot? Are you feel comfortable traveling?

directing coverage from here? Oh, yeah. I'm on a plane a fair bit to San Francisco. But, you know, Wired, the Wired of today, we have an office in San Francisco. We have a big office in New York. And then we have an office in London. So that's sort of the English language. Wired is like a three office newsroom. And I think one of the sort of tenets of my tenure or sort of my philosophy is that, yes, like a lot of this stuff is still happening on the West Coast.

But there are a lot of stories and a lot of interesting things happening in Europe, in Japan, for a Spanish language audience, like in Mexico, in Latin America. And we want to be positioned to cover all of that. So I think spending a little bit more time like looking east, looking south, looking around the world for those stories is...

you know, an advantage for Wired where we are not sort of tethered to like just the West Coast or just New York or even just like an American worldview. So I have tried to sort of embrace that. That doesn't mean that I don't spend a fair bit of time on the West Coast, but I think where we really need our team on the West Coast to be and where they are is sort of I need reporters and editors who are like out there in the world. I need them at parties. I need them at conferences. I need them

meeting with sources over coffee, you don't necessarily need the editor-in-chief sitting behind a desk, you know, typing in Slack. I can type in Slack Do you feel when you parachute in, though, and you go, wait a minute, I'm noticing this thing because I have fresh eyes. It can go two ways, right? One is, that's right, you have fresh eyes, Katie, that's great. Thanks for

helping us focus the story or and the flip side can be yeah we've known about this for a year or that's super commonplace and we know what we're doing you can yeah we don't need that oversight thank you there's a little bit of that but I think that the entire team on the west coast keeps operates at sort of like a healthy distance from the bubble that they exist in I think that

they are very good about that and sort of looking at all of it with curiosity. I think sometimes, though, the benefit of fresh eyes, whether it's me or, you know, our executive editor, Brian Barrett, who really runs the newsroom every day, is also not based on the West Coast. And so I think for us to point out that,

Guys, that's actually really weird. Or like, oh, that's actually really interesting that every party you go to, every bar you go to, every engineer you talk to, they're all talking about this. Like, that's a story, actually, because nobody else exists in this San Francisco bubble. Like, so that's news to everybody else who reads Wired, including us.

Yeah, I used to have that mindset. I still do. But now I have a lot of like, especially California in general, like, I wish I was there more often because there's there's stuff I'm missing because that's where some of the parties are. Well, I'm not a big I'm not a big party person, Peter. How is the Condé Nast lifestyle? This in the old days, this was the most glamorous. This and Time Inc. were the most glamorous lifestyle.

places in media full stop. Time Inc. doesn't really exist now. It's like a subset of a subset of a Barry Diller thing. And Condé has shrunk, obviously, and we've had Roger Lynch in to talk about that. But it's still a pretty glamorous place, and Anna Wintour is

is an institution. How has been adapting to that life been for you? Well, I mean, imagine, too, adapting to that life after running bankrupt Vice for five years, where, I mean, I would go to work in jeans and a hoodie if I went to the office at all. By the end of my time at Vice, like, the lights wouldn't turn on in the office.

There were no snacks, Peter. I mean, there was like milk. There was milk available if you wanted some milk. Like it was really... They still had that piano in the lobby though, right? The piano existed. There was a piano. I mean, it was a mess. Like it was Hot Mess Express over there. So transitioning from that to like, oh,

Oh, oh, OK. Interesting. Like that was very hard for me. I think the hardest part of my job is not running the thing. Like I know how to run the thing. I know how to run editorial. I know how to work with my partners in revenue like that stuff is very comfortable for me. I'm good at it. I know what I'm doing. The biggest transition for me in this job, if I'm being totally honest, was the public facing work.

Part of it, it was, what are you wearing? What about your makeup? I mean, nobody was asking me that, to be clear. Condé Nast is, I think, very good at abiding HR best practices. But it was very obvious that it's like, well, this is just not the kind of job where you show up in a hoodie. Like, you're showing up in nice clothes. I mean, the former editor of Vanity Fair got dragged for her stockings. Oh, I mean, thankfully, I work at Wired. Yeah, but it's different, but still. Yeah.

The most the most, I think, casual and least glamorous, no offense to all of my beloved colleagues, but it's definitely on the far end of the spectrum in that regard. But like there is a there is a public facing part of this job that I have had to get used to. The company has been very supportive in that regard.

And I'm learning to love it. But it's it's the part that's that's harder for me than just sort of like waking up and being like, OK, what are we doing about this? So does that mean that you you are expected to show up more places in public and that you don't love that or you're expected to show up more places in public in a certain kind of outfit with a certain kind of I mean, you look great. You got cool tats. What do you want for a wired editor? Right. And Condé Nast.

But did you have to give yourself a glow up or anything else? To be clear, nobody at the company sat me down and said, like, Katie, you got to – this part needs work. So just to be clear, there was no order that I sort of changed the way I dress. But you feel it and you understand, like, this is the role that I occupy now. And part of my job is to be out in the world. I think the challenge for me, if I'm being totally honest, was that I'm very shy. And –

I put a lot into what I do every day in my job. And then it's like, I have a kid at home. Like, I want to go home to see my kid. I don't. But there's this party. So like that part of it is tough if I'm just being totally honest. So it's like about turning it on.

For an hour at the park. And then like, I need to turn it off. Like I am, I'm very much that person. And I did like, I, yes, I went out and bought nicer clothes. I had to, this is, I've been a designer of choice, Rachel Comey. Um, and I will get, I'll not very nice. And I, I spent so many years being like, where do grownups get their clothes? Like I was like,

okay, American Apparel shut down under very dire circumstances. This is no longer an option for me. Is it Gap? Is it Madewell? Like, where's everyone shopping? And then I was like, oh, no, like, Perfectionist.

And professionals in New York are like in Soho. I understand. They're in these stores spending all their money. This is shocking. I had to I hired someone to teach me how to put makeup on. Like it was $250. I've never worn makeup before in my life. I did not know how to put on mascara, foundation. I didn't know how to put makeup on. So I was like, well, I better figure that out because if I have to get up and speak on stage in front of 500 people, I should probably. Or go meet Anna. Yeah.

Well, no. I mean, she sees me. She sees me bare skinned and beautiful in our one on ones. I don't wear makeup on a daily basis, but like I need to I need to be an adult a little bit more about this part of my profession. So now, you know, now you have the full story. I'm not I don't feel bad that you did not glam it up for this podcast. It's not going to happen. OK. Our last question. Our listeners can probably tell you hail from Canada.

Oh, is it that obvious? There's a couple. Okay. About boots. I always like to hear from Canadians about what the United States looks like to them right now. Wow. When you head back, what do you hear from them? Oh, man. Well, first of all, I am a dual citizen. I was raised in Canada.

by an American mom who was incredibly proud to be American. So I grew up always wanting to live here. The U.S. was like my North Star. It was like, I got to get there. I got to get to New York. So I'm a very proud American citizen. You know, the rest of my family is all still in Canada. And they are so confused about

They are so confused by what's happening. They are embarrassed. And I think that, interestingly, again, when I was growing up, there was this reverence for the United States. I mean, it was everywhere. We watched American TV. I watched the nightly news with Tom Brokaw every night.

There was this gravitational pull towards the U.S. that this is a very obvious thing to say, but like that is gone. People in my family, I have family members who refuse to come visit me. They don't want to give the United States their tourism dollars. I have family members who are scared for me and who want me to move home, don't want me to be living here.

So there is a real degree of, I think, sort of resentment and alienation and anger and fear among my family members and people that I know in Canada that this country is behaving the way that it is. And does it is again, you can you can you can answer on behalf of all Canadians. Is there a feeling that that this is a bad moment for the U.S. and U.S. history? And when it passes, we can go back to where it was or is this a permanent break? Yeah.

We're going to change in the way we're going to see the U.S. I'm trying to answer for all Canadians, but like if you asked my dad, he would say tough, tough time, tough couple years, going to be a tough couple years. But if you asked, you know, and he's in his early 70s, if you ask people who are my age who sort of traffic in like political circles in Toronto and Ottawa, it's like, no, this is

This is pretty serious. Like this isn't just we're not just going to snap our fingers in four years and everything goes back to business as usual. I mean, this is like a realignment of the world order. And and what kind of American exceptionalism do you need to adopt to think that when the Trump administration ends, it all just goes back to the way it used to be? Like we're not that special. The world is going to rearchitect itself around us and forget about us in a lot of important ways.

Man, that's a heavy way to go out at the end of a podcast. No, I asked. It's my fault. Well, I mean, I have a Canadian passport, so you know where you'll find me in four years. Yeah. I'm going to take my first trip to Canada in a while. Vancouver. Are you going to Web Summit? I am going to Web Summit. Oh, I'm going to be there. I will see you there. If you're listening, you can see me interview Gray Jaber, the CEO of Blue Skies. I'm also interviewing her. Where are we interviewing her at the same time? I don't know. We should probably figure that out. We should probably check.

All right. On that note. On that note. And you'll see me at Web Summit. I'll be at every party for 10 to 15 minutes. And then I need to go recharge my social batteries. Katie Drummond, great to see you. I'll see you in Canada soon. See you soon. Bye. Thanks again to Katie Drummond. It was great, right? Really good. Love talking with her.

Thanks again to Travis and Charlotte who produced and edited the show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you guys for free. And thanks to you guys for listening and texting and writing. Again, if you want other people to hear about this, go ahead and post it on social. That's great. Or just tell a friend. Any of it works. See you next week.

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