Recode (with Kara Swisher)

The episode frames Recode as the subject of an acquisition story and introduces Kara Swisher through her work as Recode’s co-founder and executive editor, host of Recode Decode, and earlier co-founder of the All Things Digital conference and blog at The Wall Street Journal. The hosts emphasize her interviewing record, including the combined Bill Gates and Steve Jobs interview, while the opening also establishes a deliberately informal recording setting at Recode’s studio.

Before covering technology, Swisher worked in print journalism in Washington, including at the Washington Post. She says her interest in digital technology developed before the Internet became a large industry: she used early computers, experimented with telephone couplers and a portable phone, and connected these experiences with the potential of browsers and the World Wide Web. Her interpretation was that classifieds, news deadlines and other newspaper practices would be disrupted by always-available digital distribution.

Swisher met Walt Mossberg while researching AOL for a book. Mossberg had written a positive Personal Technology column about AOL and helped move users toward the service after choosing it over efforts from Sears and IBM. Their shared view that print was changing led Mossberg to help Swisher move from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal, where she became the first bureau hire focused on the Internet and online services rather than the publication’s established hardware and software coverage.

The conversation presents this early Internet coverage as a judgment made before there was a large audience or mature industry. Swisher recalls that Yahoo and Amazon each had only a few employees when she encountered them, and that colleagues made fun of her for focusing on a still-small field. She says she continued because the emerging technology made connections across devices, media and distribution that she expected to change everything.

Swisher and Mossberg later tried to bring a blog model into the Wall Street Journal. After returning from maternity leave, Swisher had read blogs such as Andrew Sullivan’s and Suck.com, as well as TechCrunch, and concluded that newspapers could combine ongoing conversation with stronger journalism. She says management on both the editorial and business sides did not understand the proposal, which illustrates the institutional resistance the project faced rather than proving that every early blog was journalistically weak.

The opening therefore links Recode’s later identity to three choices: treat the Internet as a central subject before it was established, build journalism around ongoing conversation rather than fixed deadlines, and use interviews and reporting as the basis for a technology publication. The segment does not yet explain the eventual acquisition terms or test these choices against financial results; it establishes the personal and editorial origin of the business instead.

Swisher and Mossberg used conferences as the first practical bridge from established print journalism into a digital business. They believed the Internet was the future, but Wall Street Journal management was more receptive to a profitable conference division than to a blog. Swisher says the conference was designed from the beginning to demonstrate its value through revenue: it began in the early 2000s, and the website followed around 2007.