Kara Swisher - MPSF Speaker Series
Silicon Valley’s “most feared and well-liked journalist”, covering American technology business for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and over all media - online, podcasts, print and conferences.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021, 7:30pm PST

Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher is an American technology business journalist and co-founder and co-executive editor of Recode a technology news website focused on the business of Silicon Valley, with Walter Mossberg.

She is the host of “Sway,” the new twice-weekly interview podcast about power by New
York Times Opinion and has been a contributing Opinion writer since 2018.
Over her career, Ms. Swisher has hosted hundreds of news-making interviews, going
head-to-head with prominent figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert
Murdoch, Stacey Abrams, Kim Kardashian and President Barack Obama. Her early and
no-holds-barred coverage of the technology industry earned her a reputation as “Silicon
Valley’s most feared and well-liked journalist.”

Swisher started covering digital issues for the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco
bureau in 1997. Her column, “BoomTown,” originally appeared on the front page of the
Marketplace section and also online at WSJ.com.

Previously, she covered breaking news about the Web’s major players and Internet
policy issues, as one of its first hires to cover the Web, and also wrote feature articles
on technology for the newspaper. She has also written a weekly column for the
Personal Journal on home gadget issues called “Home Economics.”

With Walt Mossberg, over the last 11 years, she has been co-producing D: All Things
Digital, a major high-tech conference with interviewees such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs
and many other leading players in the tech and media industries. The gathering is
considered one of the leading conferences focused on the convergence of tech and
media industries. Kara and Walt were also co-executive editors of the
AllThingsD.com web site from 2007 until 2013.

Swisher won a Loeb Award while at AllThingsD.com for her coverage of Yahoo. She
also writes occasionally for Vanity Fair magazine, which is owned by Condé Nast.
Previously, she worked as a reporter at the Washington Post.

Swisher is also the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the
Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” published by Times Business
Books in July 1998. The sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL
Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future,” was published in the fall of
2003 by Crown Business Books.

Kara was an undergraduate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and
did her graduate work at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.