At an age when some may consider spending more time practicing their golf swing or perfecting their poker face, tech journalist Walt Mossberg is about to embark on what may be his biggest adventure yet. After 22 years as The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist, Mossberg penned his last column this week. As of 2014, he will helm a new tech media enterprise with longtime business partner Kara Swisher — one that still does not have a name.
Mossberg, 66, whom I’ve known for years, created one of the industry’s earliest every-person tech columns, a model for many to follow. He covered the dawn of the personal computer, the dawn of the Internet and the dawn of social media. He has received criticism for heaping too much praise on Apple products (he wrote that Apple’s iPad “cracked the code” on the tablet category) and is admired as the first to try some of those very same products.
See also: Technostalgia: 20 Misty Memories of Personal Computing
More interesting, though, is the Journal subsidiary he cofounded: AllThingsD, which covers the tech industry with a combination of insider’s insight and observer’s curiosity. ATD also runs a series of conferences, including the annual D Conference, which often makes news with tech luminaries like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.
Now, all of that is leaving Journal, and Mossberg is going with it. In a wide-ranging conversation, the influential Mossberg refused to share any secrets of his new venture or say a single bad word about Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the industry vet offered some insight and wisdom about covering tech The Mossberg Way. Our conversation, below, is not verbatim, but it captures the essence of Mossberg's comments.
Mashable: What’s the most important thing you learned while you were at WSJ?
Mossberg: I think it’s to figure out who your readers are and to never talk down to them. It’s something that they don’t exactly teach you at journalism school, but particularly if you’re going to have a column with some voice and opinion — you have to decide where you’re aiming it. If I had not filtered it in some way, it would have had somewhat less impact.
Did you always plan to go into tech journalism?
I spent 19 years as a Washington reporter covering a variety of beats. Right before [the WSJ column], I was the national security correspondent for the Journal, covering policy and military and the intelligence community. I was doing that at the very end of the Cold War and in the months before the Gulf War. I have on my wall right now a front page of the Journal from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.
The Journal had tentatively agreed to my proposal [to launch a personal tech column] a year before, but had asked me to stay on a year. It was pretty clear the Soviet Union was wobbling. They didn’t want to change correspondents. The last really big story I covered was the Gulf War.
I did not have a plan to do this all along. I became a computer hobbyist. In those days, it was in the BASIC programming language and learning to solder inside my computer. My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II. [Becoming a tech journalist] only occurred to me around 1990. I realized two things: This was going to blow up — this use of digital devices, the PC and the Mac — and that it was going to be very hard for average non-tech people to figure things out. There was a need for a column that seems unremarkable today.
What was your single biggest disappointment?
That it took much longer than I thought for the brilliant people in the tech industry to figure out they needed to greatly simplify the PC, basically the main digital device people use. It still hasn’t been simplified as much as it should.
Most PCs back then were sold without sound cards, without modems. You were expected to be a tech integrator, you were still expected to be in a business. I wrote a lot about the need for an information appliance. I think we’ve pretty much arrived at one: the iPad. A child could figure out how to use it quickly. Compare it to a DOS computer or even an Apple II; it's no longer nearly as much of a hassle or a mystery.
Were you ever dead wrong?
There were many times when I probably got it dead wrong, like any critic does. But saying, "Such-and-such is the best or a great product" or "I recommend it" and then it doesn’t succeed in the marketplace, that doesn’t bother me. I was not in there to shower praise on products that will sell well or sell badly.
It’s hard to remember how much I slammed or recommended products that later turned out to be better or worse than I had said objectively. In a few cases, I went back and re-reviewed products. It’s pretty common now online to go back and update a review, but [the Journal] was mostly print for many years.
Why not stay with the Journal?
I’m not fleeing the Journal. It’s not about that; it has treated me well. I had total editorial freedom for every one of those columns over 22 years.
The reason is really because longtime collaborator Kara Swisher and I want to build a company we can own and have the resources so we can more readily expand [and do] the kind of things we were doing at AllThingsD.
Part of that decision to throw myself into something that completely ... it would be impractical to keep writing a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal. It’s the desire to be entrepreneurial and start a company , for tech news, analysis and reviews on the web and conferences. That’s what we’re doing.
The Journal is apparently not using the AllThingsD brand anymore. Any idea why? Do you think you’ll get that brand back?
No and no comment. I really don’t know what they’re going to do. They own the brand, and we always understood that. We don’t know what they’re going to do with the brand in the future, and I can’t talk about anything to do with any negotiations.
Do you expect your and Kara's sources to follow you to your new venture?
First of all, I will correct you: Kara has not worked at The Wall Street Journal in nine to 10 years. She’s not an employee, she’s a contractor. So her [and much of the rest of the ATD crew's] network of sources have all been acquired during a time when none were employees of the Journal. We are owned by them, but we are a separate operating unit.
Many of Kara’s stories have never appeared in The Wall Street Journal or even its website. I think everyone she talks to — and this goes for all our other reporters — knows that [the story] is going to appear on AllThingsD.
Do you have a name for the new site?
[Laughing, after I suggested The Mossbergers] It’s not going to be called The Mossbergers, and it's not going to be called The Swishers, either. I’m not going to say what it’s going to be called. It is an interesting process to go through and find the names that are not already taken and names that are interesting and different.
What does it mean to tell a story in 2013?
First of all, I don’t think it’s that different than what it meant in 1913. You have to engage the reader or the viewer in why they should care or why it’s interesting, and then you have to tell the story. Obviously, the modes by which we do it are very different. I think digitally, you have to tell it with as many media tools as are beneficial to telling that story. If it involves video, photos or an infographic, you use those, but in 1913, they used what they had then. That won’t matter if you don’t do the work, find out what’s going on and have some authority behind it.
You have to have a voice and tell the story. If you are just bullshitting ... or don’t explain it to [readers], they will just stop — just as I imagine they stopped in 1913 as well.
Do you expect your new venture to be more visually experimental?
I’m just not going to talk about what we’re going to do in our new venture.
Any advice for young journalists entering the industry?
I would tell them quality over quantity, which is one of the biggest sins on the web, particularly today. I would tell them that it is enormously important to earn the readers’ trust by being ethical, another problem that some websites are guilty of. I would tell them to keep in mind who your reader is. Never talk down to that reader.
Image: Mashable