A conversation with Wired global editorial director Katie Drummond

Wired magazine feels like it’s been around forever. And perhaps these days any media that has been around for over 30 years qualifies as forever.

It has, certainly, been around during the entirety of the digital age. It has been witness to the birth of the internet, of social media, of cellphones, and of AI. It feels like an institution as well as an authority for a certain kind of subject. But what is that subject? Because Wired is not just a tech publication. It never was.

Katie Drummond is the editorial director of Wired, a position she has held for just over a year. This job is the closing of a circle in a sense, because her first job in media was as an intern at Wired. She has worked almost exclusively in digital media since, for a range of outfits—many of them shuttered—proof of the vagaries and the reality of media in the digital age.

At Wired Drummond oversees a robust digital presence, including video, the print publication, as well as Wired offices in places like Italy, Mexico, and Japan. She says that Wired “champions a better future” … meaning Wired seems like the publication of the moment, in many ways, at the intersection of tech, culture, politics, and the environment.

“There is not a print bone in my body. I have never worked in print. It is not something that I ever tried to do. It’s not something I ever thought about.”

Arjun Basu: So before we get into Wired itself, why don’t you tell us about your journey and how you got here.

Katie Drummond: I would love to and I will do that by starting with Wired, oddly enough because I started my career as an intern at Wired in 2008. I had moved to New York from Canada to be a journalist. That was my dream was to be a writer.

And I ended up making friends with a Wired editor who really liked my tattoos. And he linked me up with an internship at Wired and I started writing for him. His name was Noah Schachtman, and he was running Danger Room, which was Wired.com’s national security blog.

And so I started covering military medicine during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury. And I really developed at Wired, Like a niche for myself as a reporter that I was then able to use to pursue my career in journalism.

So Wired was really my foot in the door. It’s where I learned how to be a reporter. And from there I went to all sorts of really interesting digital-first news outlets, many of which no longer exist, which is a theme in my career. Hopefully not one that follows me to Condé Nast, but I worked at The Daily, which was Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in iPad journalism.

I was a founding reporter there. Let me see. I worked at The Verge when Vox Media was just launching that publication. I was the deputy editor at Bloomberg which was a huge sort of step in my career in terms of the size of the teams I was running and the global scope. I helped launch The Outline which is another interesting and I think experimental title that no longer exists and that didn’t exist for very long but it was fun while it lasted. And most recently, before I, I came back to Wired as the editor, I was at Vice for five years, so I ran all of Vice’s digital news teams and all of Vice’s digital brands, which included Munchies for food and Noisy for music.

But I was primarily focused on Vice News and Motherboard and Vice World News, which was all of Vice’s international news reporting. So I ran that newsroom through a very turbulent period at Vice through the bankruptcy, through all of that drama. And then was very lucky to be in a position to interview for the editor-in-chief job at Wired and then somehow, someway, be offered the job which is where I now find myself.

Arjun Basu: What was the tattoo that got you the internship? Or was it a series of tattoos?

Katie Drummond: I have maybe 13 tattoos total, but a lot of them are on my arms. And he’s Jewish. And I specifically remember him saying, “I would be covered in tattoos, but my grandmother would roll over in her grave.” And so we just bonded over a shared love of tattoos. One of us can get them, the other one cannot.

Arjun Basu: So it was unrequited tattoos for him.

Katie Drummond: Unrequited tattoos for the Jewish man. Yes. Unfortunately.

Arjun Basu: And at Vice, were you involved at all on the television side as well? Was it a multimedia kind of job or?

Katie Drummond: I ran anything that went on the website. So all of our articles, digital videos, everything on YouTube. And then all of our audience development, social vertical video, all of that stuff. And so that’s a long winded way of saying I did not oversee TV, but what I did at Vice that was really interesting was getting Vice’s TV correspondents to participate in digital. And that was a really interesting and really rewarding undertaking because we would have a Vice News Tonight correspondent going to Ukraine or going to Russia or going anywhere in the world where something really interesting and often really high risk and of great consequence and newsworthiness, wherever that was happening, they would be there to shoot a segment for TV.

And we were able to start getting them to file vertical video dispatches from the streets of Moscow as Russia was invading Ukraine, or from Kabul as the Taliban was, like, rolling back into the city. And they would file these dispatches to us and we would get them out on digital channels, obviously before any sort of really polished beautiful segment went up on TV. So I didn’t I didn’t manage those teams, but it was a really interesting process of learning how to work with them and how to get their journalism which was incredible.

Arjun Basu: So Wired feels institutional somehow, though it hasn’t really been around for that long. It just feels like it’s really embedded in the culture, and as it expands into new fields, it just feels like it’s a natural sort of expansion. So this is going to sound stupid, perhaps you can describe what Wired is.

Katie Drummond: I would love to. I think about that a lot. The way we talk about Wired, and I think It’s been interesting for me in my role. Wired is 31 years old, so Wired celebrated its 30th birthday last year when I took over, which, in my view, is a long time. I was seven when Wired was founded. And nothing on my resume really has the longevity of Wired, the title. And Wired has been through many incarnations and I’m sure we will talk about some of them during this conversation.

Wired’s job is to champion a better future. That is what we do across all of our different coverage areas. And I think that speaks to every era of Wired, under different editors, during different periods of time in the technology industry. I think that is what our fundamental premise is and our promise to our audience is that we will be here championing a better future, covering that future as it unfurls itself in front of us.

And I think for every editor who has run Wired and for every team and for every chapter, that has manifested itself differently. And so with me, and in the year 2024, that looks very different than it did in 1993 when Wired was being founded. And there’s a lot you could say about what was happening in technology in 1993. And what is happening in technology in 2024?

A lot has happened in 31 years. And I think as a publication that means that our priorities are different. It means our responsibility to our audience is very different. The platforms we publish to obviously are extremely different than they were in 1993. But to be more concise about it, many things have changed over 31 years, including Wired, but I think our fundamental premise has stayed the same.

Arjun Basu: Very few people realize that the idea was, it was two Americans, but in Amsterdam who wrote that manifesto. And it was really about tech and culture. But remember at the beginning, that it was optimistic. Or was almost like, “Don’t worry.” Or “let us do the worrying for you.” And tech’s gone through a few iterations already in those 30 years, and we’ve seen it go from utopia to something, I won’t say dystopia, because it’s not, but I think the utopia thing is a little tired now. It’s tired, not wired.

Katie Drummond: It’s tired, not wired. I think to cover technology and scientific research and everything that Wired covers, to do that today, the way that was done in 1993 through a utopian lens with clear-eyed, uncluttered, uncompromising optimism, would be a mistake. I think it would be a disservice to our audience. I think it would be journalistically unsound.

And to be fair, again, a lot has changed in 31 years, and I think the founders of Wired had a different idea about what journalism is and where Wired sits in that than someone like me. I think about journalism as original reporting. I think about it as accountability.

I think they saw Wired as much more of a place for ideas, and great writing and, again, that sort of unbridled optimism. They were much less focused on reporting and more focused on just the ethos of it all at that time, in that moment, capturing that moment in time.

Arjun Basu: And they weren’t digital natives.

Katie Drummond: Oh no, of course not. What would, what did that even mean in 1983?

Arjun Basu: I know. I’m old enough to know that I’m not a digital native either. I’m the bridge, but you’re essentially a digital native.

Katie Drummond: I am painfully—proudly, I will say. But there is not a print bone in my body. I mean, I have never worked in print. It is not something that I ever tried to do. It’s not something I ever thought about.

Arjun Basu: I wanted to ask about that, because you obviously run a very successful magazine, print magazine, but you run a media brand. And I’m just wondering as someone who definitely worked in digital, you were even at, you were at Medium, which you skipped before, which still exists. But is there a tension in the newsroom between the print and the digital? Or is it completely meshed together? I’m a subscriber, so I know what things look like, but is there a tension? And what was it for someone who came from a purely-digital background?

Katie Drummond: Yeah, I think, I’ve been fortunate in that I arrived at Wired, I think, after a lot of that sort of difficult work had been done and maybe those difficult conversations or reckonings or realizations had happened around the print magazine and then our sort of digital offering and what Wired looks like and what Wired should be across all of these different platforms.

There’s still a lot of work happening there, and I have really supercharged a lot of that. But by the time I got here Wired digital and Wired print were not two separate teams. It’s one very enmeshed organization. We are structured in a way that in no way reflects a print magazine and a collection of Internet platforms.

We don’t have any sort of separate print staff at all. And ultimately, our print magazine is one of many distribution mechanisms for our journalism. But we don’t commission stories specifically for the magazine. We commission everything to run digitally. And then of everything that we’ve commissioned and assigned, and everything that’s in the works, and everything that’s been published, we look at our next close date and we figure out what should run in print and what should just remain as a digital story.

So the thinking at Wired has already, I think, evolved a great deal towards being a digital first publication, which we are and which the staff knows that we are. I think the thing that still lingers for people is that emotional attachment, that sentimentality, that appreciation of a print magazine and the tangible feeling of holding it. The prestige that is still inherent in a print magazine.

And I think the challenge for us moving forward is how do you take that prestige and that premium quality that a magazine just like inherently has by virtue of its history by virtue of the fact that you can hold it and feel it, how do you take that and translate that to the internet? I’m not saying no one has ever done that. I think when I opened The New York Times app, I think that feels like a very premium experience. It’s beautiful. They tell stories beautifully.

I don’t think we are as far along as I would like us to be towards creating a really premium digital experience. And I think that’s something that we’re working on. It’s something we talk about internally all the time. And that’s exciting. It’s exciting to think about and work on that. But I don’t think that we have—I don’t think anyone here at Wired is fundamentally hung up on the print magazine or certainly not working exclusively on the print magazine.

**Drummond and fan.** (Photo: Shayan Asgharnia)

Arjun Basu: I guess a lot of people wouldn’t know that when Condé Nast bought Wired, they only bought the magazine.

Katie Drummond: They did.

Arjun Basu: They didn’t buy the website.

Katie Drummond: Hotwired was the website. I believe actually it was the first commercial website to exist. There’s some very specific sort of designation that Hotwired has in the history of the internet. We’re actually working on a story about it right now because I believe it’s 25th anniversary is coming up. And we’re going to do an oral history. Please nobody scoop me on that. I think we have the exclusive locked in on that one.

But yeah, Condé Nast bought the print magazine. Ultimately, several years later, they either acquired the website or they spun off a new website like Wired.com. But I remember being at Wired in 2008. I think I was 21. And the web staff, they weren’t even staff. Everybody was a contractor who worked on the website and it was two separate worlds. There was the print magazine over here. There were all of the contractors who made the website happen over here, like literally on another side of the floor.

It was completely siloed and there was an A team and a B team. The A team had full-time jobs and health insurance. The B team was making the website work. And I remember at the time thinking about how strange that was. I thought that was very weird because it was so obvious to me, just inherently obvious, that the print magazine thing wasn’t long for this world. I was just like, “Why wouldn’t everyone just read the stories on the internet? Why would you read them in the magazine?”

Arjun Basu: Because some people love magazines.

Katie Drummond: I was about to say that is a very unsentimental point of view. I’m not a very sentimental person. That’s a very unsentimental view. I still get magazines to my house, and I still sit and read The New Yorker, and I do the crossword puzzle, and I love it. But I remember even in 2008, just like remarking on how strange that felt that it was so separate.

Arjun Basu: Especially at a place like Wired. So do you think it’s playing catch up in a way? You said you’d like the digital experience to be better. Because I think the magazine’s gorgeous.

Katie Drummond: Thank you. I agree. Yeah.

Arjun Basu: I think it’s gorgeous. And I think it’s really, it’s a great book. The covers are great. And the website is also very good. And what does the website need?

Katie Drummond: That’s a great question. I think there are lots of storytelling devices that I would love for us to be able to offer our audience in a more seamless way, right? I think when I’m looking at the New York Times, they obviously have a product infrastructure that is just gargantuan and massive. But I find that I’m able to really seamlessly navigate between a text experience, a vertical video experience, an infographic, right?

I can do all of that on my phone in a really easy, intuitive way. And I would love, I think for me, the North Star of that question is: Wired has this long legacy and this long history of being really highly regarded for its print design, right? It has won many awards for its print design. It’s always on the cutting edge. It’s always thinking a little bit differently. It’s taking risks. We are very well known for that on the print side.

I would love for us to get to a place where on the digital side, those same conversations about Wired are happening. So one thing that we talk about with our creative director, Alyssa Walker, who is incredible and is very much a “digital brain” is, okay, there’s been this idea of the digital cover, right? All of these publications do their digital covers, and it’s often just—maybe it’s an animation of your print cover and you put it on Twitter and you’re like, “It’s our digital cover.”

What would it mean for Wired to think, in a forward-looking way, in an experimental way, in a risk-taking way, What does it mean for us to put out a digital cover? What could that look like? What would the audience experience of that be? How can we reinvent that or reimagine that the way we have rethought and reimagined so much about print design and about what’s possible in the pages of a magazine? How can we bring that to the internet? And I would say those are the conversations that I think a publication like Wired should be at the cutting edge of.

And I think we are playing catch up, quite candidly. Because we are, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, we are a legacy title. We have been putting a lot of time and energy for many decades into a print product. We are now putting less time and energy, quite frankly, into that print product. How can we take all of that energy and all of that creativity and apply it to digital instead. And that’s the journey that we are on to make it sound fun, which it is.

Arjun Basu: Whenever someone says “journey,” they usually are saying a nice word for “really hard work.”

Katie Drummond: But it’s fun! I work with amazing people and I will find several opportunities in this conversation to say that. The team at Wired—they are smart, they are ambitious, they are endlessly creative. So it’s just about channeling that creativity towards our website, our newsletters, our podcasts, our vertical video offering. All of these other ways of getting our journalism out into the world—it’s spending more time there, and less time on the magazine, ultimately.

Arjun Basu: I imagine that all of the titles at Condé Nast are going through some form of this. When we spoke to Radhika Jones last year, The Hollywood Issue was about to come out and so they had done a lot of exclusive stuff for the website for the first time based on The Hollywood Issue, but you got the sense that they were still trying to figure out how to transfer that legacy print product onto digital in a way that matched it. Not just matched it, but was a great digital product as opposed to just this transfer over. Do you ever talk to anyone else at the office?

Katie Drummond: Oh, definitely. Most of the Condé Nast titles, or maybe I shouldn’t say most, but many of them, have a print magazine. Some of them are now digital only or were always digital only. But it’s a conversation that comes up all the time. I think different titles at the company have different priorities. They have different business models. They have different advertisers. For some of the brands here, and I can’t speak for any of them specifically, but, fashion and luxury advertisers are still really invested in print and that’s like a different calculus than a publication like Wired.

Where our biggest advertising category is technology companies. And they are much less interested in a print magazine buy than, like, pre-roll on YouTube. Every brand is in a different place in how they think about the print/digital equation. But I think certainly for all of us, there’s a constant conversation around creating a really robust, really meaningful, really premium digital experience for our audiences, and what tools do we have to do that? What are the best ways to think about it? What sort of learnings can we share with each other? And, particularly in digital, how to navigate as well. You’re trying to create this great experience for your audience while you’re also navigating the latest “grenade” that was just thrown into your office by Meta or by Google or by OpenAI or by whichever other technology company is disrupting the media today because there’s always somebody.

So it’s a real juggling act and there’s certainly a ton of conversation around the best way to navigate all of that while still ultimately thinking about, What does someone in my audience want from me and what will be the best experience of my journalism for that person on this platform on this day at this time?

“We don’t have any sort of separate print staff at all. And ultimately, our print magazine is one of many distribution mechanisms for our journalism. But we don’t commission stories specifically for the magazine. We commission everything to run digitally.”

Arjun Basu: So you have the word “international”—you’re the Global Editorial Director.

Katie Drummond: I am.

Arjun Basu: So how “international” is international with Wired? How does that work? What does that imply?

Katie Drummond: So Condé Nast owns and operates Wired in the United States, in the UK, in Italy, in Japan, and in Mexico. And then we have four more licensees. A separate company licenses the Wired name. They have an editorial team that runs Wired. And when I got here, I would say that kind of global piece of my role meant very little because other than the US and the UK, which were working more closely together by the time I showed up—and are now completely integrated—so we have one English language Wired team across San Francisco, New York, and London which makes a ton of sense, particularly digitally when you’re thinking about time zones and how to optimize your coverage and use that to your advantage.

But other than the US and the UK, every edition of Wired was essentially running completely separately. So they had their own editorial strategy, they had their own video series, they had their own print issues with their own themes, they had their own events with their own names. And it’s only been in the last six months—I’ve been in the role a year, so it took me six months to figure out the US, UK—we are now in a place where we are sharing a lot of journalism, so we syndicate and translate a lot of journalism from Italy, from Japan, from Mexico, and they syndicate and translate a lot of English language Wired journalism for their audiences.

And I think, particularly from working at Vice where we had journalists, like, genuinely all around the world. I had a big team in Asia. I had a big team in Europe, a big team in Latin America. I feel very strongly that the best international journalism and the most rigorous, and nuanced, and worthwhile journalism from other parts of the world is done by people who live and work in those parts of the world. It’s not from someone that we put on a plane from New York and we fly them to wherever and they do their sort of anthropology and then they come back and they write their story.

I’m much more interested in hearing from people at Wired Japan in Tokyo about what is happening in Tokyo? What is happening in Japan? What should we be paying attention to? What’s interesting? What should we translate from them and surface for our English language audience? So we are really, I think, in the early stages of essentially globalizing Wired. And my goal in another six months or a year is if someone goes to Wired’s homepage in the US, it feels internationally-representative. I want to have more international journalism in the “pages” of Wired—on the website or in the magazine. And I want that to come from the journalists that we employ in those parts of the world.

I think that’s a differentiator for us that has not really been tapped by previous leadership and just the way Condé Nast used to be structured. Condé Nast International was a completely separate company from Condé Nast in the US. So it’s only in the last five years that this has even been on the table. But I think it’s a really interesting way for Wired to be different and unique in a very competitive tech publication landscape.

And also to just, I think, tacitly indicate to our audience, we don’t have to bang them over the head with it, but the reality is, a lot of what’s really interesting, and consequential, and even exciting and optimistic about technology, that’s what Wired Is not happening in the US. It’s not all headquartered in San Francisco anymore.

A lot of it is happening in other parts of the world, and I want our coverage to reflect that. And I think we have an opportunity to do that, even just by virtue of the fact that we have people already who live and work in Mexico, live and work across Latin America, live and work in Tokyo. And we are only going to expand from there. I think there are other markets where I would love to see Wired. And that’s something that we’re working through in the next few years.

Arjun Basu: So you don’t necessarily oversee those.

Katie Drummond: No, I do. No, I do. I am the boss of them all. And I think part of the challenge for me is figuring out how much of that autonomy to preserve. And how much of it is really important that in Japan, that their print product, their events really reflect the on-the-ground priorities of that audience, and then how much quote unquote global synergy, to borrow a corporate word, do we want to try to create. Because the worst case scenario is that you globalize the brand and you dilute everything special in all of these different parts of the world. But it’s like, where can you find those common threads? Where can you find the kind of points of connection? Where can you find opportunities to team up and collaborate and do really interesting work together?

And then, I think fundamental for me, where can you find those stories that really should be told in a bunch of different languages to a bunch of different audiences, because they are just so core Wired and they are just so interesting?

“You’re trying to create this great experience for your audience while also navigating the latest ‘grenade‘ that was just thrown into your office by Meta or by Google or by OpenAI.”

Arjun Basu: The world is always in constant flux. And the tech industry for sure is, but it just feels flux-ier now. I can’t believe I said that. So how does Wired attack that? It really does touch everything. Some of the best environmental stories I’ve read in a while have come from you guys. You started a politics vertical, when you came on, you almost wrote a manifesto, it felt. So what is it now? All of those things showed like what you said at the beginning, it champions a better future, but that just is such a big topic. How do you capture that?

Katie Drummond: That’s a challenge that we navigate every day and that we navigate within resource constraints and all the other things that are very challenging for any media brand for any title right now. I don’t think we will ever be able to tackle everything that we want to. I think that we need to be very focused and I think we need to really focus on differentiating ourselves.And really offering our audience something that they feel like they can’t get anywhere else.

Two primary things I would say on the politics side: I don’t want to give myself too much credit for being prescient about how much overlap there would be with technology in this election. But it was very clear to me when I started the job—I remember I had my first day and then my second day, I didn’t sleep all night and I woke up at four in the morning and I sent Anna Wintour, who’s my boss, an email. And it was like, “Anna, I need to hire a politics team. Here’s why. Here’s my mission statement for this new desk. Here’s the staffing that I need. What do you think?”

And she wrote back and it was something like, “How many headcount do you have?”

And I was like, “None.” And then I had to sit with her and figure it out.

But she was like, “Yes. You should do this. We want to do it.”

So it was literally from my second day I knew that we had to do this because it felt impossible to be a publication that’s talking about a collective future, a shared future in a year where there were more elections taking place around the world than there ever have been simultaneously before. And a pretty damn consequential one in the United States of America.

It was like, We can’t sit this out. We can’t sit this out. And furthermore, it’s not just about that sort of shared future. Even then, before we knew about the kind of Silicon Valley executives who’d be endorsing Donald Trump, before we knew a ton about exactly how AI would show up in the election.

It was very clear that mis- and disinformation, artificial intelligence, hacking, foreign interference, that all of these factors would be really pivotal in the upcoming election year. And I just felt like we needed to make a big statement. And we needed to really cover this. Not just like explainers on what Biden and Trump thought about climate change.We needed to be more sophisticated, and I think sharper, and more focused than that, and really deliver something of meaning, and of value, and of import for our audience, and hopefully even beyond that, just work that would in some way, shape this election year. So that is one piece of how I think about politics.

I don’t think that you can unravel politics from technology anymore. And so for that reason alone, it felt like we had to be there, we had to show up. But I think the other piece of it around how we wrap our arms around the whole thing, I think what has been really important for me in orienting Wired is that we just need to be first on things. We need to be looking around the corner. That doesn’t mean, “Oh my gosh, a story breaks, we need to get our story up before the other guy gets their story up.”

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being able to look around the corner and know your beat and know what you cover so well that you get the scoop that nobody else got, or you find the angle that nobody else has, or you say something that nobody else has quite figured out that they should say yet.

We just, we always need to be there. We always need to be, like, right up against that edge. That’s the North Star. That’s the goal for the team. And what that has translated into is a much sort of higher metabolism newsroom—using the word “newsroom” period to even talk about what we’re doing—but a real orientation around scoops around differentiation around bringing audiences stories about the future, about where all of this is going, that they can’t get anywhere else.

And I think it has, genuinely, I think it has yielded some really good journalism. Whether we can accomplish that across everything we cover every day, all the time—of course not. No, of course not. But I think we are doing the very best that we can to do that as often as possible. And I think we are succeeding more and more often at that mission statement.

Arjun Basu: You’ve said the word AI a few times now. How do you feel about it? I think it’s overhyped, but I know it’s not bullshit, although I’d like to say it is, but is AI bullshit or is it just the people behind it?

Katie Drummond: Wow. I’m going to answer that question carefully. It’s certainly not bullshit. It’s real technology. And I think the way we try to cover it, and the way I think about it is, I think Wired plays two roles in, in my world view about AI. And I think generative AI in particular is what everyone is talking about, and so I’ll assume that’s what we’re talking about here.

You can be really fascinated by the technology. You can think about the development of generative AI, its various incarnations, how it’s being used, the sort of social ramifications. You can just look at the technology and be like, this is fascinating. And you can cover it from that point of view, right? You can get in the weeds and be a nerd about it and cover the tech. There’s that piece.

Then there are the people in the institutions who are creating the tech, who are marketing the tech, who are raising money against the tech, who are doing all the things. I put them in a different sort of bucket of coverage. Because I think that our job is to be fascinated by the technology and then to hold the people and the companies creating that technology to account for the consequences of the innovations that they are creating.

I think that that second bucket to me, and that’s where I spend most of my time and most of my energy, but I do think that like it is the technology itself in a purely nerd way is interesting. I think it’s fine for people to think it’s interesting. It’s okay to think that technology is amazing, and impressive, and cool. But I think you really have to interrogate.

What are the motives of the people who are creating the technology? Why are they talking about AGI and comparing artificial intelligence to the nuclear bomb? Why are they in such close touch with lawmakers in DC, even while saying that they welcome regulation and can’t wait for regulators to hammer down on them and give them some rules of the road? Why are they deploying this technology and putting out new, faster, sexier versions of it what feels like every three weeks, right? Like, why are all of these things happening?

I think those are the questions I am most interested in tackling and answering. So I won’t say that any of it is bullshit. But I will say that there is a really pressing need to closely interrogate what is happening and why. And I think it reminds me a little bit of—and other people have made this comparison, I’m not like having a revelatory moment—but when the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world were coming up and taking on new prominence and were met with, sure, critiques and criticism and concern, but a lot of really unmitigated optimism and enthusiasm and excitement.

No regulation. Like just no laws. No rules. And we all saw how that turned out. We all just lived through all of that. We are still living through it. We are still dealing with the consequences of that moment in time. And to me, this moment with AI—like I am watching myself live through it again with a different technology, right, like with a different movement. And I think that media journalists, lawmakers certainly, although goodness gracious, I just can’t wait to see the day where we have regulation that actually outpaces technological innovation in this country. But I think we all need to hold ourselves to a different and a higher standard in terms of scrutiny, in terms of coverage, in terms of rigor, yes, in terms of regulation, than what we just did.

So that’s how I feel about it. Bullshit, not bullshit, people can argue about that. Is the technology real? Yes. Will it usher in sweeping societal changes the likes of which we can only compare to the advent of electricity? I don’t know about that. I really don’t know about that. Will it write your email for you? Definitely. Yeah, if you want it to write some emails. It’s got you covered there. No problem.

Arjun Basu: And I think about the environmental side of this. And Wired is an interesting outlet for looking at all of it, because all of the things you mentioned, the tech obviously, and its impact, the political, the regulatory side of it, and then the environmental side, which is disastrous. There aren’t too many media out there that could really do a good job of understanding all of those different components. A media might understand one of them, or two of them, but not all of them the way Wired could.

Katie Drummond: The way I like to think we do. Yeah, I agree with that. AI is wide-ranging in its implications and what it touches. I think that the environmental piece that you bring up—that’s interesting to me when I’m thinking about that, because it is this invisible X factor, right? Like people can’t see it. It is not widely covered because I think what ends up being widely covered about AI is the Scarlett Johansson voice saga, or whatever Sam Altman said about AGI the other day, right? It’s all of the hype, it’s all of the controversy, it’s the sexiness.

Not enough outlets and not enough people, I think, are talking about: “Hold on a second, here’s what this technology can actually do, and then here are the implications for the climate and the planet. Does that trade off seem worth it?” And there’s not a lot of interrogation of that happening. I will, however, be, I don’t think pessimistic, but I think pragmatic or realistic in that even if that conversation was happening more often, even if people fell on the side of these trade-offs don’t make sense, I can write my own email.

The reality is, and I think the reality that everybody needs to get on board with and grapple with, is that generative AI and the deployment of that technology—that is happening. Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, whether you think it is for the social good or not, it doesn’t matter. Because the companies that create this technology are so far ahead of all of your concerns.

They are moving quickly and they are doing it in a societal and a political environment where nobody is going to stop that, right? It is happening. And so I think it’s our job at Wired and journalists more broadly to navigate that fact with their audience, help their audience navigate that fact, be very clear eyed about the consequences and the implications and the promise, too.

But the truth is, regulation or not environmental consequences or not, it’s happening. And so I think it’s our job, to your point, to cover that from as many different sides and as many different coverage areas as we possibly can.

Arjun Basu: Shall we discuss the election?

Katie Drummond: We shall. I have CNN on in the background right now. Let’s do it.

Arjun Basu: How are you going to cover or how does Wired cover the election?

Katie Drummond: We cover the election, and we are covering politics in a very focused way. We are not here to do the day-to-day horse race, the polling, Trump’s up in Pennsylvania, now Harris is up in New Hampshire. That is not what we do. There are plenty of outlets that do it really well. Audiences know to go there for that coverage. I think our lanes are much more specific and much more focused. And I could talk about what we have done, but I think what’s more interesting to me is what we are doing now, what we are about to do, and really where we’re focused.

Mackena Kelly, who’s one of our politics reporters—our politics team, just to be clear, it’s four people. It’s an editor, Leah Feiger, and three reporters who are fantastic, but Makena is at the DNC this week, and she just put up a story today about how the DNC has essentially been willingly taken over by creators and online influencers. How this is really like the influencers convention to the extent that they are being treated much, much better than the traditional press.

They’re getting exclusive access to wine and cheese nights with major Democrats and political operatives. They’re being shuttled around in fancy rides, whereas the traditional press is just being penned off in a cordoned off area. And what that shift indicates in terms of the campaign strategy, in terms of how the Democratic Party sees itself marketing itself to a new era of voters.

So we’re really interested in stories like that. Like where the internet and politics collide. So sure, mis- and disinformation. Sure, creators and online influencers. Of course, AI and tracking, how AI is and is not used in this election. It was just used by Donald Trump to claim that Taylor Swift had endorsed him earlier this week.

Arjun Basu: Every election has a new thing in terms of the media and in terms of digital, but this one just seems like a meme election. Like in the past, events created memes, but this is almost reverse-engineered. It just feels that way, so far at least.

Katie Drummond: Absolutely. It is very clearly part of the playbook for the Democrats. And certainly for the GOP too, right? They’re not immune from this. I just, I don’t know that they have that cleverness really dialed in.

Arjun Basu: It just feels like it’s a Tik Tok election.

Katie Drummond: It’s a Tik Tok election.

Arjun Basu: Okay. What are three magazines or media you’re especially excited about these days?

Katie Drummond: Ooh, that is a good question. Ooh. What am I loving? What am I excited about? I think worker-owned publications are very interesting to me, are very exciting to me, and are very impressive to me. So 404 Media is a publication run by four former colleagues of mine from Vice. In the year that they have existed, they have been punching so far above their weight. It’s crazy. They’re excellent. They do really phenomenal technology reporting.

I think in that same vein, when I was talking about the value of international reporting being done by reporters who live in the parts of the world that they cover, I think the Rest of World is certainly a media industry darling at this point, but I just think that they have championed that philosophy.

Arjun Basu: I love Rest of World.

Katie Drummond: Yeah. They just live, and publish, and work according to the ideals that they put forth when they were founded. And I have a ton of respect for that. They do the difficult work of getting the visas and doing the translations and really working with people on the ground, even if English is not their first language, to get the story out of that journalist instead of doing what might be easier, which is to just send someone there to do the story. Like, they do the hard work. They’re very creative. They’re very enterprising. I am constantly really irritated by the really great stories that they publish.

And then I think on the politics side, there’s a newsletter called For What It’s Worth, run by someone named Kyle Tharp. And they track the election in the context of digital, particularly digital spending, like how different campaigns are spending money across digital platforms, how their digital strategies are manifesting and changing, and how the internet is intersecting with politics. And it’s just a smart, sort of, differentiated look at politics through the lens of internet strategy. And he’s very smart, and he writes it in a really articulate, clear way.