Podcast: Wired’s Makena Kelly on Elon Musk, DOGE, and breaking news narratives

 I had never worked on a story like this before, with so many bylines and with so many people chasing after something that was still happening in real time. 

There were about three editors who really kind of made this feature their big product, their child. What we started out doing was, OK, everyone get in a [Google Doc]. And just type in all of your notes … a bunch of notes that you think are colorful, that are something that we can't fit into a story that you're working on right now. Maybe it's a conversation you had, it doesn't fit into the story, but you think it's a really important detail. Just spew all of that into a giant shared Google Doc. 

And then that's when our editors would take turns and shifts. It was essentially shifts … taking these notes, organizing them in a way that made narrative sense to them. And then the writers would come back in, and we'd add more stuff, and write it out in a way that actually made sense.

I think it turned out really well for how it was organized chaos, in a way. And I feel like it's almost … symbolic or emblematic of the moment that we're in as well, the process of this, and then also what we're covering and what we're writing about.

I really treat my conversations with sources … as an ongoing conversation and a relationship. These people have no reason to trust me. There is no reason for these sources to trust me at all. And if you go into it like that, and you're like, OK, this is what "on background" means to me. This is what this would look like if you talk to me. … If you were to tell me something and we're talking on background, that means I can attribute it to "a source at the CFPB."

I try to be incredibly transparent. … A lot of these people at agencies, they don't talk to reporters. These are just like your average, everyday workers. Talking to a reporter is not something that they expected to do, and a lot of them feel a calling right now to do it based on … their oath of office that they take. These are people who really feel like they might be putting themselves in a lot of danger by talking to reporters. And so I think you should treat that with the caution that it deserves.

I think  Signal has been too good to journalists, where it's like, "We are the best app," … "Just always do this," where it feels like you don't even have to learn anything else. [But] you will not be safe by default. … You need to be looking at your Signal messages that you're sending to people and be like, somebody could take a screenshot of this and post it online. You need to be messaging people defensively.

I ended up noticing that in 2020, because of the pandemic, they — Joe Biden, everyone, all these Democrats who were in the primaries — weren't able to do traditional campaigning because there were lockdowns. And I was like, OK, well …what if I am a campaign beat reporter and I pretend that, instead of being on some candidate's bus, I am following them on the internet. And so, at the time I just kept following. If Bernie Sanders did a Twitch stream after a debate, I wanted to see how that worked, how that operated, what was the strategy behind it? Also, just as a younger person — I had just graduated college — I used to watch a lot of streams. I used to watch all kinds of stuff, and I'm a very OG YouTube girl.

And so these influencers and things were something that was my media consumption diet, and then I'm seeing these politicians go into these spheres of influence that I grew up with. It led to a lot of scoops because there were all these young people who were trying to get their candidates to listen to this fun and innovative stuff they're doing online and be like, "This is how you reach young people." 

My biggest advice, whenever anyone asks me for it, is that you need to go where you're needed. Because at [CQ Roll Call] I had no idea what I wanted to do. And what I found out, though — slowly — is that they didn't have a tech reporter at CQ Roll Call. And so I kind of just slid into that. And it was at a perfect time where, like, the net neutrality debate was coming back up in 2017. It was the new Trump administration. They wanted to roll back net neutrality. That's something that I just knew of because I was an incredibly online teenager. And so I knew about the original net neutrality fight in 2014. I was like, I know this one policy debate very well. So I kind of just dove into it, and that's how I got into tech reporting. It was simply out there being a need that I could fill.