Exploring the future of digital news with Wired’s Katie Drummond
I sat down with Katie in early April to talk shop at the Toronto Public Library.
Hey y’all! After two weeks eating my way through Italy, I’m back home and ready to hit the ground running in what will be a busy month for me and The Green Line team. 🏃🏻♀️
With all the shifts in our industry over the last decade, whether we’re talking business models, AI or local media, the future of news is never far from my mind. So it was a privilege (not to mention super fun!) for me to chat with one of journalism’s sharpest minds, Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired. We got so much positive feedback from our audience at the Toronto Public Library that I wanted to share highlights from our wide-ranging and laugh-filled conversation, below. Watch the video if you want to see the whole thing!
On influencers getting more access than media during election campaigns
Anita: In our pre-conversation, you mentioned something really fascinating about how the Biden campaign is actually giving greater media access to influencers over traditional media. So, can you tease a bit of some of the stories that are going to be coming out of Wired in the next little while?
Katie: These campaigns, the Biden campaign among them is — they're becoming very savvy about how audiences consume information, who they trust, who they listen to and who they don't. And I think there is a real recognition among political campaigns and even among the media that audiences, particularly younger audiences or voting demographics, are less inclined to go to a news outlet or even the president or presidential candidate than they are their favourite person on TikTok, right? And so the Biden campaign has, I think, very strategically been tapping digital influencers on the shoulder and saying, you know, we'd love for you to get the message of our campaign out to your audience on these platforms where you have a big sort of organic audience. And Makena [Kelly], our reporter, went to an event in New York a few weeks ago; it was a big event — Biden, Obama and Clinton were there, so, the convening of these three presidents. And all of the press was sort of shuttled off into like a press room. And the influencers, who were invited, were given sort of just wonderful treatment by the Biden campaign. They were invited to go along with the president to his various, you know, do-pa-do-pa-do. And [Makena] was sort of sitting in the press room being like: Wait a second — I thought that was my job. So, she wrote a little bit about it. But we're going to be looking at that and sort of how these influencers are being sort of utilized by various campaigns.
On navigating media’s financial challenges in the current digital era
Anita: You mentioned that this is obviously an unprecedented time to be covering politics or any sort of issue these days. And you've worked at Vice, Bloomberg, Gizmodo. What did you bring from those experiences to your current role from both editorial and business standpoints? Because as we know, this is the time and era when media industries worldwide are struggling financially.
Katie: When you look at my resume, I can't help but notice that most of the news organizations that I have worked for no longer exist, right? So Gawker Media was acquired out of bankruptcy after it was sued into oblivion by Peter Thiel. I was there through that period. Those websites are now being sold off piecemeal by a private equity firm that acquired them. They are shells of their former selves. I mean, they are not doing the kind of journalism that I think Gawker was once known for. Obviously, if you think about Vice, I mean, it is hard for me, still, to talk about it without feeling emotional because it was a very troubled company at a financial level. The journalism is something that will be very, very hard — if not impossible — to replace in this media ecosystem. So, those experiences, and seeing sort of how fragile this industry is, and sort of how quickly journalism that audiences come to love and trust and know, can disappear. I mean, the journalism that Vice journalists did — hundreds of them around the world in Asia, across Europe, in Latin America, all across the United States, in Canada — it just doesn't exist anymore. It has disappeared. So it has given me, I think, a real resoluteness and sort of like an obstinate stubbornness to make the business of journalism work. And I came into Wired feeling very strongly about that — that we need to figure out what is the business model for this specific publication that will allow me to sustain this. I feel like I am the steward of this publication that has been in existence since 1993 — since I was seven years old. I want it to continue to exist for another 30 years. How do I make sure that that happens? This is an industry that is in very, very, very precarious circumstances. I would love to say I spend 100 per cent of my time working on journalism; I probably spend 45 per cent of my time working on journalism because I spend the rest of my time making sure that we're making money. And I don't want the journalists who work for me to be worried about that. It breaks my heart to think that they might be worried about that. I want them to be worried about the election. I want them to be worried about the stories that they are trying to get onto the page.
On navigating generative AI’s impact on society and media
Anita: So this is a point in our conversation where I inevitably bring up artificial intelligence, right? Who's talking about AI these days, you guys? So, I'm really curious: How will Wired cover specifically generative AI's impact on society in a way that informs without resorting to alarmism or sensationalism? Because you can see this binary conversation emerging about AI where it's the heralding of a new era and technology, and it's just kind of breathless optimism, especially in business sectors. But then also at the same time you have, you know, this really fear-based resistance including our in our own industry as well, right?
Katie: I will say it's very interesting to work in an industry that feels an existential threat from this technology, and then trying to cover it. I mean, I work for a parent company that is like any media company, right? Like the New York Times is suing OpenAI right now. My own parent company is in conversations with these generative AI companies about how they are using our data, how they're using our archives and all of the work to train these large language models. So there's something very meta about it. But I agree with you that I think a lot of the coverage is breathless. It's hypothetical. It's lost in the clouds. It is either: We'll all be dead in 10 years, and there will be a robot standing over your body laughing, or we're all going to be working four day weeks and it's gonna be so chill, and you have never had a better time than when you let this AI take over your job and do all your work for you.
The reality is actually it’s, in practical terms for a typical white-collar worker, it's like having a smart college age intern helping out. They make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate every once in a while. That's where we have to clear: We're not talking Robocop, crazy future world. So that's how we're covering it, right? Which is trying to be very grounded in the here and the now, always with an eye to the future. But I think you start to lose people, you start to lose audiences when you're just esoteric up here in the clouds. Like, no, how does it work?...Trying to tell the stories about: How is this technology changing people's jobs in this industry, in that industry?
Anita: You've raised a good point about how we've gone through this before with social media. In fact, both you and I have been in the technology media sector for some time; I used to work at Mashable and there was a lot of breathless optimism about social in the mid-2000s to late 2000s. So what kind of lessons did you learn in your tenure from that experience? And how are you bringing that to your coverage of AI?
Katie: I mean, don't take the money, I think, is a good lesson. You know, I think there are a lot of really cautionary tales to be told about that era, thinking sort of from a self-interested, insular media point-of-view. I work with someone who's fantastic and he worked at BuzzFeed, and I always say, “Remember the time that Facebook gave all of these media companies a bunch of money to do live video on Facebook, and it was gonna be called Facebook Live, and it was going to reach just hundreds of millions of people. Then BuzzFeed, like everyone, was doing the lowest common denominator video coverage that they possibly could to try to get the biggest possible audience. And there was this infamous clip where BuzzFeed took a watermelon and they put elastic bands around the watermelon, and it was like: How many elastic bands can we put around this watermelon until the watermelon explodes?
Yeah, it was this seminal moment in digital media And I say to him, “Don't you think about the watermelon all the time?” Of course, Facebook misled media companies about how widely viewed these videos were, pulled the funding and everybody got laid off. No more watermelons for anybody — and I mean, these are hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars going to these companies. So, I think one of the the biggest cautionary tales for me and lessons for me in that, just coming back to kind of our discussion about business, was if a platform offers you audience and money, tread very carefully because you never know when that plug is going to get pulled. It's incredible to think about Facebook's stated commitment to news 10 years ago to now. Our traffic at Wired from social media has gone from something like 65 per cent to 7 per cent — that is a lot of audience to have to make up as a media company. So I think the biggest cautionary tale is: If there is journalism happening on a platform that you don't own, that you can't control, be very, very careful about how you invest in that platform. I want to reach those audiences; I want to reach the audiences on TikTok. I want them to know and love Wired journalists and our journalism, but we can't give away the whole show. We can't control what TikTok does and does not decide to do, or what the federal government does and does not decide to do with that platform.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
The Green Line: You’re invited to our upcoming events!
Toronto (like Canada) is a "tossed salad" to America's "melting pot.” 🥗🍲
As our city’s immigrant communities have continued to grow — with over 50% of our population born outside of Canada — geopolitics and municipal politics have become deeply interwoven in our city’s social fabric.
So, in partnership with the Samara Centre for Democracy, The Green Line is hosting Local Democracy and Diaspora on May 23 from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Samara Centre’s beautiful space at 33 Prince Arthur Ave., a conversation featuring panelists Jaskaran Sandhu (State Strategy, Baaz News), Cheuk Kwan (Toronto Association for Democracy in China), and Ryan Singh (Indo-Caribbean Association).
Our event will focus on how these fraught conversations are impacting local democracy with an eye towards the Canadian federal election in 2025. Refreshments will be provided, so please RSVP now before spots fill up.
As mentioned in the March edition of this newsletter, The Green Line is excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Scadding Court Community Centre to launch a community newsroom and engagement outpost right in the heart of Alexandra Park!
Visit us between this May and August to chat with our community journalism team, eat delicious snacks from Market 707, and tell us about overlooked and underreported local stories that are important to you.
We’re also celebrating The Green Line’s 2-year anniversary and throwing a launch party for our outpost on Saturday, May 25, so please join us from 1-5 pm outside Scadding Court 707 Dundas St. W.
Quick and Clean
Shout-out to Nora Hertel’s Project Optimist for her fantastic use of The Green Line’s Action Journey guide to create their very own Action Journey on wildfire evacuation in Minnesota!
ICYMI, the International Journalism Festival just published a video of my panel, “Revisioning the journalism industry through a ‘solutions’ lens: delivering and measuring social, editorial and business model impact” (it was a wild adventure to get to Perugia, hence me giving my talk virtually, but I still had a lot of fun).
As my husband and I near our second wedding anniversary, I’m revisiting and recommending Anam Cara, a beautiful book by one of my favourite philosophers John O’Donohue, which was a big part of our engagement and wedding
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Happy early Stackaversary.
And happy early anniversary to both you and your husband. :).