Peter Kafka of Business Insider interviewed Wired global editorial director Katie Drummond about its success this year.
Here is an excerpt:
Peter Kafka: In February, you guys said you’d added 62,500 subscribers in two weeks. At first, I thought that number was a typo — publications just don’t grow that fast. But apparently you really were. What happened?
Katie Drummond: The answer 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 colossal audiences to Wired. I’ve never seen anything like what we saw in February and March. That was where the subscription boom came from.
Lots of publishers saw interest in Trump spike in 2016, 2017. But lots of wise people said media companies wouldn’t see a “Trump Bump” this time around. Were you surprised to see that level of interest?
We weren’t expecting it. I’ve worked in digital media long enough to just always expect the worst, or just the status quo.
Where the real surprise for me came from was that when 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 a week, I looked around, and was like, “Where is everyone else? Why aren’t other news organizations covering this?”
Read more here.
