Wired will not put out a print magazine in the UK in 2026 as it focuses on global digital subscriber growth.
Seven editorial staff left Wired’s London office at the end of 2025, with the team being rebuilt to focus on audience development roles and some UK and Europe-focused reporting.
Global editorial director Katie Drummond told Press Gazette that creating a “sustainable and growing subscription business is the future of Wired…
“While other components like advertising and commerce play a really important part, I don’t want Wired to be at the whims of anything that I can’t control the way I can control the journalism.”
A spokesperson said direct-to-publisher subscribers (meaning those who subscribe through Wired rather than a third party) were up 20% in 2025 while new subscribers taking the digital-only option doubled.
Wired’s US subscription revenue was up 24% in 2025.
Katie Drummond: I want Wired to feel like ‘genuinely global offering’
Drummond told Press Gazette that London remains “of paramount importance” to the global editorial operation (which comprises around 120 people, with plans to increase that by at least 10% in 2026).
She said: “We made some strategic changes at the end of last year going into this year to better orient this newsroom around what we were doing with Wired globally, and to really think of the London office as a hub for key roles.
“So all of our audience development leadership, for example, is based out of London, because we want to be starting the day strategically with newsletters, social, vertical video – what are we doing across all of these functions? Those decisions should be made and executed on first thing.”
Seven London-based Wired journalists left the business at the end of 2025 including Greg Williams, deputy global editorial director and UK editor-in-chief.
Other roles affected included managing editor, global design director, associate editor, science editor, features editor and senior business editor.
Along with a further two roles that were vacated and not replaced earlier in 2025, this meant the team approximately halved in size in under a year.
However, Drummond ultimately expects the UK headcount to be rebuilt to its previous level: “We are not losing staff here. We’ve just made decisions about what are the roles that it makes sense to have in London versus New York versus San Francisco versus maybe in some of our other offices internationally.”
Wired is recruiting a deputy editor based in London who, Drummond said, will have a “mandate of going out and finding the most interesting, differentiated, unique enterprise reporting from across the UK and the EU that we can bring to wired.com”.
A general staff writer focused on the UK and EU is being recruited, with a second reporter expected to follow. Job adverts are currently live for a photo editor, an editorial assistant and a content editor for Wired Consulting.
“So the genuine reality and the truth of it was we wanted to set this office up to better cover the UK and the EU, rather than to feel like an appendage of a US operation,” Drummond said.
“I genuinely want nothing more than for Wired audiences, whether they’re in the US, whether they’re in the UK, whether they’re in Germany, wherever they are in the world, I want them to feel like Wired in English language is a genuinely global offering.”
‘It makes less and less sense’ for Wired to publish in print
In print, Wired UK dropped from publishing six to four times a year at the end of 2024. There will be no magazine published on this side of the Atlantic in 2026.
Drummond explained: “I love a print magazine. I like to hold one. I occasionally like to read one. But I think looking across all of our markets and thinking about what makes the most sense for Wired moving into the future, it makes less and less sense for us to be publishing print products.
“As nostalgic as we are for them and as lovely an experience as it can be, we really want to be where audiences are, and that is on .com, it’s on the app, it’s in the inbox, it’s on Tiktok, on Instagram, on Youtube, on all of these different platforms.
“We simply didn’t feel that it made sense to publish a print magazine out of the UK anymore. In the United States, we have that subscriber base who still pay to get Wired in the mail. That’s not how the the Wired UK business was built. So it was just sort of a different calculation.”
According to the US-based Alliance for Audited Media, the Conde Nast-owned brand had 482,935 total print/digital subscriptions in the second half of 2025, of which 280,384 were digital only.
In the UK and Ireland in 2024, the latest available ABC figures, Wired published six issues with an average circulation of 32,404. Of these, 10,080 were individual subscriptions, 10,302 were free distributed copies, 4,838 were single newsstand sales, and 7,399 were via ‘all you can read’ users of services like Apple News+.
Wired continues to put out a quarterly print edition in Italy and two issues a year in Japan. It also has a team based in Mexico City producing digital-only Wired in Spanish content.
Drummond said: “We put out a great print product in every market where we make a print magazine, but every decision we make about print is a digital-first decision.
“So I am not thinking about commissioning for a print magazine… We’re thinking about great stories that we can commission, that we think will do really well online with our audience, and then we are packaging some of those stories for a print magazine.”
Wired also plans to produce two issues a year in the Middle East, where Wired launched with a team in Dubai in February (after previously being run under a licensing agreement), around ten days before the US attacks on Iran began.
Drummond said the Middle East launch is an “exciting indicator of where we are going on a global scale” as it is producing “reporting from people who live and work in the place where the stories are happening…
“I think we’re going to get more of that kind of coverage out of the UK now that we have just made the right strategic shifts in terms of what roles do we have where and exactly what are we asking them to do.”
Wired ‘needs to be first way more often’
Drummond, who joined Wired in August 2023 from Vice where she was senior vice president of global news and entertainment, said the brand’s subscriber growth over the past year has come “just off the back of our journalism”.
Wired is traditionally a technology magazine but has expanded its remit further into the intersection with politics.
In early 2025 Wired went big on reporting of US government cuts made by the Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency” or DOGE. Drummond said this “added a lot of subscribers to Wired – but we saw that growth consistently through 2025”.
Drummond also cited work on Jeffrey Epstein, stories about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, the AI talent wars and wider narrative long-form features. This year, Wired has seen a further “big uptick” in subscribers from its reporting on immigration raids and ICE.
Drummond said: “Since I joined, I came up with this idea that we call Story Zero. The idea is that Wired should be the place where Story Zero happens, and that means we should be telling stories before anyone knows there’s a story to tell.
“So in the context of hard news – whether it’s politics or security or business, which are three of our verticals – that means scoops. That means we should be breaking news. We should have stories before anybody else has those stories.
“In some of our other coverage areas, like science or culture, it means we should be looking around the corner. We should be introducing audiences to innovation, to discovery, to new forms of digital culture, new ways of interacting. We should be spotting and naming trends before anybody has realised that that’s a thing.
“We need to be first way more often. We need to be starting conversations, not reacting to conversations.”
This focus on “unique and differentiated” coverage will, Drummond believes, help protect Wired from changing search and social algorithms and the impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher clickthroughs.
She said Wired has been “working very diligently through the last several years to build a direct audience. We want people to come and spend time with Wired on the platforms that we own and control. We want them to read our newsletters.” Wired launched five subscriber-only newsletters last summer.
It is now working on improving its “digital design and our digital storytelling” with the hiring of a London-based developer, has reopened comments on stories, connects readers with journalists via livestream Q&As, and will launch an app in the first half of this year.
She said Wired’s direct audience is “up consistently month over month”, doubling year on year in the US in 2025 with global direct traffic up 85%.
Overall, February 2026 was the month with the lowest monthly global visits to wired.com in the past three years at 14.5 million (according to Similarweb), down 34% in that time frame. It was down 32% year on year.
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Facebook content era led to fake traffic
Drummond described the drive to grow Wired’s direct audience as “an offensive knowing that search traffic was bound to change” and said it is all about “learning from the mistakes that publishers have made over and over again”.
She described the Facebook traffic era in which “you could just publish like one word in the CMS and 100,000 people would ‘read’ it.
“No one was ever actually reading it. Those were fake numbers. So I think learning over and over again that you can never rely on platforms that you don’t own and operate yourself to create and cultivate a sustainable audience and a sustainable business.”
A recent estimate by Ahrefs of US organic search traffic declines to tech publications suggested Wired has seen a 62% drop since November 2024, with an average decline of 58% across the sector.
Drummond disagreed with the accuracy of these figures although she said Wired has “certainly seen an impact from search the way every other publisher has”.
In particular she highlighted Wired’s commerce business, which has been hit hard by receiving less search traffic.
“That is, for us and for so many other publishers, a really critical part of our business that we are seeing these behemoths like Google pull from under us in a way that isn’t right, but is happening regardless,” she said.
In response Wired has been focusing on making its review section Gear more of a destination based around areas where the brand has “authority and credibility”, including via personality-driven newsletters.
‘Google couldn’t care less if we live or die’
Drummond said they had been forced to “right-size that operation, and to think with an audience-first mindset around commerce the same way we think with an audience-first mindset around our editorial. Those are one and the same.
“And so I think acknowledging that Google couldn’t care less if Wired or any other publisher lives or dies, we need to make sure that we live and thrive, regardless of what happens to Google.”
Drummond sees social media as “the top of the funnel” and “the best possible marketing we can do for the title. I want some small segment of those people, over time, to continue to love what Wired is putting out on those platforms to the point that they decide to sign up for a newsletter, spend time on the website, download the app. I want them to come and build a relationship with Wired…
“I am under no illusion that those platforms are the be-all and end-all for us as a title or as a business. They’re not, but they are still very, very important drivers of audience and mechanisms for exposure to expose as many people as possible to Wired.”
Drummond is unabashedly “ambitious” about Wired’s future: “I think that we are no less than the defining publication of this era,” she said.
“When I took this job, so many people asked me questions like: ‘Well, technology is everywhere now. So how does Wired fit into that? What right does Wired have to play in that space if everybody’s covering technology?’
“And I think we have reframed that for ourselves by, rather than thinking of Wired as a niche technology outlet that competes with everybody else in this coverage, I think of us as a general interest publication that is better equipped than anybody else to tell the most important stories about how the world is changing.
“So I think of us as no less important than that, than as the publication of record for this transformational moment in history.”
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