Katie Drummond of WIRED Delivers the 2025 Pringle Lecture

In her remarks during the 2025 Pringle Lecture at Columbia Journalism School’s Journalism Day, WIRED Global Editor Katie Drummond congratulated the graduates and reflected on the values that have defined her newsroom’s reporting in a turbulent year. Drummond used the moment to share lessons from their groundbreaking coverage of DOGE and Elon Musk’s influence on federal agencies—lessons she described as “fundamental tenets of journalism.”

Her 2025 Pringle Lecture appears here in full:

--as delivered--

Hi everyone. First of all, I want to extend my congratulations to all of you, and my thanks to Jelani Cobb and the rest of the Columbia Journalism School leadership for having me here today. And not just me. I’m so delighted that WIRED as a newsroom was chosen to deliver this talk, and I’m joined by five journalists from our newsroom who’ve been instrumental in WIRED’s coverage of Elon Musk and DOGE’s unrelenting incursion across the federal government: Brian Barrett, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, Tori Elliot, and Makena Kelly.

I am the ambassador for this group, but I’m delivering a message that came from and comes from all of us. And we wanted to use our time with you to share a few of the lessons we’ve learned through our reporting this year; I think they are fundamental tenets of journalism, at least the kind I believe in and champion, and they’ve been proven out time and time again for us over the last several months. We hope they can be of use to all of you, as you embark on this new chapter in your lives and your careers.

When WIRED started reporting on DOGE, and what they were doing inside of federal agencies back in January, everybody was surprised. WIRED does a lot of great journalism, I’d be the first to tell you. But from our peers in the journalism industry to politicians and even some sources, a lot of people kind of went…WIRED? An editor at the New York Times asked me whether we’d hired a private investigator to get stories. Other people kept asking me who we knew inside the administration; which person was leaking all of this information to us? How was it possible that WIRED was so far ahead of our competition, that we were breaking stories on a daily basis that were putting vastly larger and better resourced outlets to shame?

It’s actually very simple, and very true to the way we operate every day. So I’m going to share with you four of WIRED’s rules of the road; ways of working that we rely on, now more than ever. I hope they’re helpful.

FIRST OF ALL, ASK VERY BASIC, STUPID QUESTIONS. AND THEN GO TRY TO ANSWER THEM.

In early February of this year, Tori Elliot published a story identifying six young men—all between the ages of 19 and 24—who had little to no government experience, yet were playing key roles within Elon Musk’s apparent effort to strip cost out of one federal agency after another. It was among the first few stories WIRED published on DOGE, and it was a blockbuster scoop. But it started with a few very simple questions: What is DOGE? And who works there?

After we answered that question, we just kept asking more. Always basic, one-sentence questions, although they got more complicated as our reporting kept going. Who else is working for DOGE? Which agencies are they working inside? What are they doing inside a given agency? What systems do they have access to? And what could they do with that access? Every story that we’ve published on this subject, this year, has been in answer to a simple question that our journalists set out to solve within days of Trump winning the 2024 election.

Reporting is complicated work, and I don’t want to sugarcoat that. You’re dealing with manipulative or mistrustful or scared sources, difficult comms people, your own newsroom, your lawyers, your own insecurities, your own ego; you’re trying to find the truth amid a lot of chaos and then get the truth to a place where it’s a publishable story in the eyes of everyone who needs to sign off on it. It’s messy, and it’s hard. The answers to your questions might be complicated or opaque; they might take weeks to find out, or they might take years. You might never answer one of the questions you have.

But the questions you’re trying to answer in the course of doing your job, of defining a story, should be simple. They’re the intrusive thoughts you have in the shower, or the detail that pops out at you when you’re reading a story in the newspaper, or the “why” that springs to mind as you listen to someone talk. It sounds very basic, I know. The good news is – and I do think this is a tiny relief in an otherwise very challenging career – it is basic. And it works.

EMBRACE WORKING AS A TEAM:

I don’t need to tell you that the field you are entering is a competitive one. It is brutal out there. You’re competing with other journalists and other outlets, of course, and sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you won’t. You’re competing for attention, in a sea of articles and videos and recipes and podcasts and AI slop. If you’re leading a newsroom, trust me, you’re competing for every dollar you bring in the door from subscribers or advertisers. I am incredibly competitive, so I know all of this very well. I know how it feels to win at all of these things, and I know painfully well how it feels to lose at them. You’ll experience the wins and the losses too.

But there is one place that you shouldn’t compete, and where WIRED doesn’t compete, and that is within our own newsroom. On any given day, several of the stories we publish are bylined by more than one reporter; on our DOGE reporting in particular, the majority of those stories have two, or three, or more bylines. And that’s not to mention the close collaboration required between reporters and editors, of course, or collaboration with our fact-checking team, our copy editors, our design team, and our lawyers.

We don’t champion collaboration because it’s a nice idea, although it is. Our reasons are much more tactical than that. Collaboration is often how you get the best possible version of a story, as fast as responsibly possible. On DOGE in particular, the best version of a given story often meant pulling in reporters with expertise across a range of subjects, including Elon Musk’s background, the technical details of artificial intelligence, and of course, politics and the federal government. And the fastest version of a given story means pulling together a team of reporters and having them fan out, bringing back their reporting and working collaboratively with editors to shape it into the story we want to tell.

I believe, and we believe, that journalism is best executed as a team sport. Act like it. Get to know your colleagues, whether fellow reporters, editors, or members of your photo, design, and fact-checking teams. Be kind. Support them. Celebrate their success. Ask them for help, and help them when they ask. And then go kick every other outlet’s ass together.

KNOW YOUR BEAT, AND THEN MEET YOUR MOMENT:

If there is one thing we believe in at WIRED, it is the importance of having and owning a beat. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be versatile, or adaptable; that beat might change once during your reporting career or it might change several times. Whatever that beat is, do your best to make sure it’s something you can get obsessed with. And then get obsessed. Nerd out on it, sink your teeth into it, and understand it inside and out, day in and day out.

For one thing, that’s how you go from good stories to great stories to deeply impactful, award-worthy stories. Your expertise, your sourcing, your ability to ask and answer those basic questions I talked about earlier – it all builds on itself over time. At WIRED, our best beat reporters start out writing short news stories, then they start breaking stories, and over time, that iterative reporting builds on itself until it’s a 10,000 word feature on the cover of a print issue or a 20-minute documentary on YouTube.

Whatever your beat is – truly, whether it’s Microsoft or it’s gardening – there will be a moment where that beat is the heart of a major news event. There will be a moment where your beat is the single most important thing in the world, where you have an opportunity to meet the moment in a way only you can. Be ready for that moment at all times; always assume that moment is tomorrow. To do that, you need to work at it every single day. Make the phone call. File the FOIA request. Check in on a source. Read the competition. If you had told us a year ago that a combination of Elon Musk, artificial intelligence, Donald Trump, and federal agency databases would meld together to become the biggest story in the world – we might have believed you, but probably not.

But when that did happen, WIRED was ready. And we were ready because our hungry, obsessive beat reporters had spent months or years acting like their moment was just around the corner. Whether they covered AI or the tech industry, they knew what questions to ask, who to call, and where else to look for answers. I’m proud to say they met that moment, but remember that they didn’t do anything crazy to accomplish that – no private investigators! – other than owning a beat, tracking it religiously, and being ready to jump when the moment called for it.

BE AFRAID, BUT WORK FEARLESSLY:

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “fearless journalism,” a lot. People love to describe journalism as fearless – boldly holding power to account and publishing vital, newsworthy information that’s in the public interest. I believe in fearless journalism. The entire team at WIRED does. But I want to encourage you not to assume that fearless journalism means you can’t, as a human being and a working journalist, be afraid.

Right now, if I’m being totally honest, you should be afraid. I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid for the digital and physical safety of my staff, the safety of my family, and of myself. I’m afraid every time someone who works at WIRED, especially someone working in the United States on a visa, crosses the border back into the country. I’m afraid about what this administration will do next. Will they go after sources, or journalists, or their employers? I’m afraid that more media companies and more institutions, those tasked with protecting our first amendment rights, will follow in the lead of ABC News, or Paramount, or yes, Columbia University. They’ll bend in the face of brazen, unconstitutional, and unethical government interference and pressure. I’m afraid that these institutions will not stand up when they need to; for journalists, for students, and for everyone living through this moment.

So what do we do amid all of this? Amid the fear and the uncertainty? I can tell you, unequivocally, what WIRED is doing: We’re getting up every day, we’re getting to work, and we’re endeavoring to publish the clearest, boldest, most fearless journalism of our careers. The work can be fearless in its nature, in its DNA, even if the person or the people doing that work are afraid. I can’t tell you what to do – but I can tell you what I hope you do. I hope that you take everything you’ve learned here at Columbia, the energy that you have, the drive that you have, and I hope you join us in doing the work – the tireless work, the fearless work, even if you are afraid. This industry and this mission need you. We need your fresh eyes, your new ideas, and your energy – trust me, many of us are very tired – and we need as much sunlight as possible cast on the people and the institutions shaping our shared future.

Earlier in this talk, I told you to kick other outlets’ asses. And I meant it! But as competitive as this profession can be, now is also the moment for all of us to band together, to go to bat for one another, to share advice and guidance, to safeguard the first amendment and the fundamental right of journalists everywhere to report the truth. Welcome to the club, and remember that even if WIRED is trying to kick your ass, we’ve also got your back – and we’re grateful to know that a group as talented as this one is going to have ours.

Thank you again, and again, congratulations to all of you.