The day I'm due to interview Kara Swisher is the day Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo steps down. Just two weeks before, Swisher had asked him on stage at the Code Conference if his job was in danger. Costolo indicated that he wasn't going anywhere and that his job was safe, claiming he and the board were "in sync".
It's a rare story that gets away from Swisher. She is known for her ability to sniff out a story, coaxing even the most reluctant tech chief executive into spilling his or her guts. Swisher broke the stories on the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo and Google's move for Groupon. She even got Mark Zuckerberg to reveal what was written inside his trademark black hoodie – it's Facebook's mission: "Making the world more open and connected" – on stage at the All Things Digital conference, the predecessor for the Code Conference and Re/code tech site that she set up with business partner Walt Mossberg.
The thrill of the chase is what motivates her. But sometimes, there’s one that gets away, such as Twitter. “I didn’t get that one,” she says.
Swisher once joked that she got her scoops through the use of “Tasers and idle threats” but the real story is that she is old school when it comes to sources, building relationships that ultimately deliver.
“I think a lot of reporters . . . they get what they need for the story; I tend to stick around a bit longer,” she says. “I’m interested in a longer-term relationship I have with people I cover. I try to develop and know a lot about what they’re doing and ask a lot of different questions, not just what I’m writing about. I spend a lot more time developing relationships over the long term versus the quick hit. It shouldn’t be unusual.”
Swisher has been described as one of the most fearsome tech reporters on the scene and one of the most well liked. It seems like an odd compliment, but it doesn’t faze Swisher.
“I don’t think I’m that scary to people, but it makes for a good story, I guess. I just try not act like an asshole when I’m reporting,” she says. “I think reporters can be super snarky or super cheerleadery in the people we report on.”
Ethics statement
Swisher is known for her detailed ethics statement, something she says is necessary in today’s media. It discloses everything from her spouse Megan Smith’s (from whom she is now separated ) involvement with
and the US government to their financial arrangements.
“I think it’s a necessity if you’re writing in this day and age to be as clear and transparent as possible with readers,” she says. “It’s respectful of the reader.”
That respect has to be a two-way thing though. Re/code caused controversy when it removed reader comments from its site in November 2014, telling readers that with the bulk of commenting and discussion of stories actually taking place on social media, on-site comments were becoming less and less useful. The site now displays the Twitter handles of writers more prominently, and they, including Swisher, engage with readers on social media.
“I felt like they weren’t up to the same calibre as what was going on on the site from a journalism point of view. The comments had become a stress pool,” she said. “I don’t really want to argue with the name ‘Jackass’ about Bill Gates . . . [anonymity] lets people think they can act in an appalling manner, and I’m not really interested in that. I don’t care to listen to them. I don’t have to.”
Swisher has her personal crusades including the diversity – or lack thereof – in technology. She points to studies that show even from purely economic points of view, diverse work forces are more beneficial. And yet the majority of the boardrooms in tech companies – and further afield – are made up of white men.
“There aren’t enough women in tech period, there isn’t enough diversity. The game is fixed for white men in tech. They act like it’s all meritocracy, but how is it they can’t find competent people of different races and genders? It’s a ridiculous argument they make that this just happened,” she says.
“In our education system we’re failing women in terms of maths and science and getting them interested and properly moving in to the big jobs and encouraging them to do so for all kinds of reasons.
“I try to educate my kids on the privilege they’ve got and why they have it, and while some of it has to do with their own qualities, some of it has to do with what they look like. I want them to be aware of the advantage they have. “
The sale of Re/Code to Vox, which publishes the Verge and Polygon among others, has divided opinion. Former TechCrunch reporter Paul Carr expressed his opinion on Pando that he thought Swisher had “lost”.
There were musings about money troubles, and comparisons to Gigaom, the news site that shut down suddenly in March, although it looks like it’s being resurrected later this summer.
Funding
However, Swisher is clear that the decision was what was best for Re/code.
“We’ve been doing this for 12 years. We got an option we thought was really interesting,” she says. “The tenor of advertising has changed drastically in the past year. All these companies that compete with us have gotten enormous funding. Our choice was either to get bought or get another funding. I thought the first was a better choice.”
While Gigaom ran out of money before its closure, the same cannot be said of Re/code; in fact, according to Swisher, the company still had two-thirds of the cash it raised in the bank at the time it sold to Vox.
“We were not running out of money,” she says. “We looked ahead and thought we either need to raise a lot of money, because everyone is raising a lot of money and they’re spending it in ways we’re not able to, or we attach ourselves to a larger entity.
“Would they prefer us to spend all the investors’ money and fail? Or do we want to do something dynamic as entrepreneurs at the right time to ensure that it continues? I was looking out for years down the road, and I thought this was the best choice we had right now when we’re in a powerful position. That’s what good entrepreneurs do.“
Whatever the reasoning behind the move, Swisher, Mossberg and Re/code are now free to continue doing what they do best: supply interesting content. The description of journalism as a dying industry thanks to social media and its popularity isn’t one she subscribes to; she rejects it outright.
“There’s never been more interesting content, never been more access and platforms, there’s never been more opportunity to create content with tools that are really powerful so I think the problem is people running newspapers or whatever. The business has changed but that doesn’t mean interesting content has,” she says.
“You have to figure out where readers are and serve them, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in great content. Reporters are the most risk-averse people on the planet. They like to lecture everyone on how to run their businesses, but refuse to look at their own.”
Criticism
She doesn’t hold back in her criticism of the newspaper industry. She accuses “dead trees” of romanticising things, pointing out that there have always been good publications regardless of the medium.
“This idea that [all] newspapers were great just isn’t so. Some were great, some were shoddy,” she says. Lighter items have always existed and thrived, and newspapers are terrified of the change that technology is wreaking on the environment.
“There’s really good people out there, and there’s really bad, and it’s been that way from the beginning of time in journalism. I think the quality of people writing for online has gone up dramatically from just a few years ago and will continue to go up as more people enter the workforce,” she says.
“People tend to try to act like just because there’s technology attached to it, the human race is different.”
Some things don't change though. The story that got away – Twitter's Costolo stepping down one – is already old news. In the meantime, Swisher has appeared at Inspirefest 2015 in Dublin, tried out UberPop in the middle of an anti-Uber demonstration in France and reported the move of Vevo's Luke Kallis to Snapchat. The news cycle continues, and it's on to the next scoop.
