Thirty years of tech journalism faces similar challenges to other beat reporters, like getting too close to sources and missing broader trends. Other characteristics are unique to tech-savvy journos: having an entrepreneurial bent, relying on live events, both for news and for revenue, and being especially entrenched in a community you help grow but also report critically on.
Among tech reporting’s founding disciples is Kara Swisher, who published earlier this year a memoir called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, and knows these challenges well.
The influential, if controversial, veteran went from Washington Post to Wall Street Journal, before launching with her mentor Walt Mossberg a conference series and then an independent news site All Things Digital. She went on to a series of ventures and editorial posts. She’s among the longest-running Silicon Valley insider-journalists — and in that way, the godmother of the journalism I’ve brought to second-wave geographies with Technical.ly.
She’s navigated extended disclosures and been called both overly boosterish and too critical. In my far smaller way, it’s all familiar to me. I enjoyed the book for that reason, though it grated on me in other ways. Even for someone as accomplished as she, the book reads as self-aggrandizing — very few mentions of her staff, and even fewer expressions of where she had fallen short. Nearly everyone she introduces appears to have failed to take her sound counsel.
Yet I do respect what she did for our craft, and I appreciate her in contrast to the longer-running Silicon Valley insider publication TechCrunch, founded in 2005 by investor Mike Arrington. She defines herself as a teller-of-truths to power, calling Silicon Valley “assisted living for millennials.”
I, too, have navigated cheering on good, dynamic parts of our economy with its frequent misuse. Big tech wants to be regulated lightly like media companies but they want to be blameless for how their platforms are used, like a telephone company. The age of the internet and software has meant near infinite scaling, resulting in untested boy kings like Mark Zuckerberg, whom Kara has long criticized.
As she writes: “The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives.”
That much has influenced how I balance my work. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- She quotes Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013) as saying “the digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even printing. “ And she says “he was right.” … but was he!? (p. 35)
- Kara Swisher wanted to go west to cover the business of tech not the tech — Walt Mossberg the respected WSJ tech columnist whose first lede was the famous: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault”
- As pointed out in reviews, like one by Wired’s Steven Levy, Kara didn’t include in her book much of anything she got wrong like betting for eBay or betting against Facebook
- The book is focused on her combative relationships with people like Netscape founder turned influential Silicon Valley VC Marc Andressen, though she also names people like Netscape’s later CEO Jim Barksdale (also later an Aol CEO), as those she respects
- The lineage of the web goes something like: the Internet, then World Wide Web, then the Mosaic browser (commercialized as Netscape) and then (remember) Yahoo was primarily a directory and then later the search engines
- Tech leaders love the media until they don’t
- The young eat the old
- AOL time warner deal: she wrote a book on the deal
- Says Google had less “menacing aggression” than Microsoft (the Seattle giant that Silicon Valley was going to rise above)
- Walt Mossberg called Facebook and its peers “greedy information thieves”
- In Bezos’s iconic first letter to shareholders in 1997, he named a host of partner Internet companies — none of which survived, save Yahoo
- General Magic’s 1994 object-orientated operating system Magic Cap was ahead of its time because iPhone and android used many of its features
- In 2003, Walt and Kara launch the All Things D conference, which really led with the “live journalism” conference format — would not pay for speakers
- George Lucas told Kara Swisher at “her” conference that he thought YouTube was “throwing puppies on the freeway” and not art
- She details Eisner’s and Igers many Silicon Valley failed purchases including Manors and Babble and Kerpoof and later Vice (she liked Iger)
- Mark Zuckerberg’s smog run in Beijing in 2016
- Kara’s interview with Zuckerberg about Holocaust deniers, in which he downplayed his role and only two years later removed the content
- The above is more recent than her 2010 interview of then 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in which he became noticeably sweaty
- In her column the “expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg,” she calls him “one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology”
- “The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives” 171
- Calls it a “mirror-tocracy,” in which leaders only like what reminds them of what they see in the mirror
- In 2018, The New York Times published a searing quote on misinformation: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”
- “Facebook was a platform designed to create crisis and rage as the rubles rolled in.”
- Her grandmother: the graveyards are full of busy people
- In 2022, the conservative-leaning satirical news site Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter for a stupid trans joke; The decision seemed to suggest there was little clear process for removal
- By my count, the only time in this book Kara appears to admit she made a mistake comes on page 224: she thought Musk was the guy to transform Twitter, and now disagrees (p 224)
- Of Silicon Valley: “assisted living for millennials”
- Refers to Zuckerberg as “most damaging” and Musk as “most disappointing” man in tech
- Her “prick to productivity ratio”
- She lists as those she considers thoughtful leaders: Terry Semel, Dick, Costello, Steve, Case, Susan Wojcicki, Steve Jobs, Jim Barksdale, Tim Koch, Reed, Hastings, Jerry Yang, Dr. Lisa,, Craig Newmark, Meg Whitman, Mark Cuban, Marc Benoff, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella
- Credits younger Evan Spiegel, Brian Chesky and Kevin Systrom; Aileen Lee (who coined unicorn), Reid Hoffman
- Tells story of bluffing her way to break the news of Yahoo buying Tumblr
- Something I’ve long coached my newsroom too: “Pro tip: I always asked contacts for a cell number when things were good, so I had it when things went sour”
- She says she saw Scott Galloway speak at a 2017 event in Germany and invited him to Recode Decode after 2015 Vox sale, now she works closely with him
- Says her podcasts have always been profitable
- For those seeking softer news about Silicon Valley elite, she says read “a hagiography” of the tech luminaries but this book reads as one of her, so the punch doesn’t land for me