NEW YORK (AP) — 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 has written about a 25-year-old engineer, Marko Elez, and his access to the sprawling Treasury Department systems that make government payments. Its stories about 19-year-old Edward Coristine, nicknamed "Big Balls," included one about how he's on staff at a federal cybersecurity agency.
In a hard-hitting piece this week, Brian Barrett outlined a week's worth of mistakes by the young government efficiency team, including being forced to hire back employees belatedly deemed critical and claiming $8 billion in savings on a project when it was actually $8 million. Barrett wrote: "Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly."
The outlet's coverage has paid off with new subscribers
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.”
Upon its launch as a magazine in 1993, Wired was an instant success as a chronicler of Silicon Valley, its people and its products. It was acquired by Conde Nast in 1998. Drummond's media career began as a Wired intern in 2009, and she returned home after being senior vice president of global news and entertainment at Vice Media.
In hiring three reporters and two editors for a new politics team, Drummond said “the bet that we made was that this sort of Venn diagram between business and politics would become increasingly vital for a publication like Wired to cover.”
At the time, there were worries about how technology would help flood the 2024 campaign with disinformation, and Drummond wanted to own that story.
That didn't turn out to be as much of an issue as anticipated. Instead, Wired wrote about the rise in non-traditional media influencers and the increased coziness between the Trump campaign and Silicon Valley executives. In that context, one reporter was told to concentrate on Musk as a beat.
“Even though we had not anticipated that Elon Musk would become the story, we were ready to cover it, just because of our background in (covering) him as a business leader and personality,” she said.
With Trump in office and Musk assigned to make bold changes in the federal bureaucracy, finding out about the team he was putting to work became top priority. It was in Wired's wheelhouse.
A prominent Trump supporter suggests Wired is doxxing workers
Not everyone was happy. “Remember when Wired was focused on cutting-edge technology and how young college dropout founders could change the world?” conservative influencer Charlie Kirk wrote on X, including a screenshot of a Wired story. “Not anymore. Now, they're doxxing DOGE employees and whining that they are too ‘young’ and ‘inexperienced’ to reform America's government.”
Kirk's reference to doxxing — the malicious publication of personal information that can be used to harass someone — is a stretch in this case, said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor with an expertise in social media.
“They're working for the government now,” Grygiel said, “so I don't see how that is doxxing.”
However, in a since-removed social media post, a Virginia college professor publicized the names of some of the workers, urging, “Doxx them.” Musk replied to that message, writing, “you have committed a crime,” according to The New York Times.
Asked about the criticism, Drummond said that “our coverage speaks for itself. It is rigorously reported and fact-checked.”
Initially, she 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.
“What I'm most proud of is that we blazed a trail and set the sights of other news organizations on this specific topic,” Drummond said.
And, she said, “we don't plan on stopping. We are very committed to continuing to cover Musk and the Trump administration and the changes that are happening inside the federal government.”
___
David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP