I’ve been a fan of Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher for nearly two decades, since The Birmingham News publisher was smart enough to buy Mossberg’s weekly “Personal Technology” column from The Wall Street Journal to publish in the “My.Tech” section that I created for The News back when AOL and Windows 95 were a thing. I was happy my column ran on a different page from Mossberg, which I hoped made it a little harder for readers to see just how much better was his column, and how much better-connected he was to industry sources.
Fast-forward to today, nearly a year after they left The Journal to found Re/Code.net. I like the site because:
* It’s a go-to place for industry news, which I still care about long after I gave up that column.
* Its reviews remind me of Consumer Reports, which are objective and not just because they refuse to take products from companies desperate to see their products reviewed.
* They have some of the most impressive transparency-focused ethics statements I’ve ever seen. (Click to see the bios of Swisher and Mossberg, and then click on “Ethics Statement.”)
As a solid profile of Swisher in New York magazine notes, those transparency statements are necessary because of the nature of technology journalism, Swisher’s relationship with a Google executive, and the All Things Digital (now Re/code) conference that could easily become a conflict of interest between journalism and the desire to bring big names to the conference.
Even in my few years of writing technology news all those years ago, I saw how easy it was to be sucked into the desire to make sources happy to gain access to their personalities and products. (I remember journalists at the 1997 E3 convention in Atlanta, using a fancy and fairly new device called a “scanner” to make it cut-and-paste easy to put their bylines atop press releases.) As the New York profile notes, Swisher has earned a reputation as a hard-edged reporter who avoided the traps that befall many who would cover the technology industry:
“A smart young person in the Valley thinks being a reporter is basically being a PR person,” says one tech journalist. “Like, We have news to share, we’d like to come and tell you about it.” Reporters who write favorably about companies receive invitations to things; critics don’t. “They’re very thin-skinned,” says another reporter. “On Wall Street, if you call them a douchebag, they’ve already heard 17 worse things in the last hour. Here, if you criticize a company, you’re criticizing the spirit of innovation.”
Transparency is no silver bullet for the problems of journalism, but it can help when covering a business that requires journalists to have close access and be wowed by the trappings of money, tech, and power. After years of high-quality work, Re/code deserves praise for the track record of its journalists.
Benjamin Wallace’s New York article is replete with questions of media ethics — for Swisher and Mossberg, for loyalties, for commerce, for less-ethical competitors, and for the Web. Media ethics students ought to take a look.