Journalist deemed digital VIP

Pilgrim graduate, Mossberg, follows technology, reviews latest gadgets

Joe Kernan
Posted 11/5/14

At a New York City event on Nov. 10, veteran technology journalist Walt Mossberg (Pilgrim High School, 1965) will join the 2014 class of the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, headquartered in …

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Journalist deemed digital VIP

Pilgrim graduate, Mossberg, follows technology, reviews latest gadgets

Posted

At a New York City event on Nov. 10, veteran technology journalist Walt Mossberg (Pilgrim High School, 1965) will join the 2014 class of the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Appropriately, the hall of fame is a virtual entity, at least for now.

Mossberg, who left the Wall Street Journal in January of this year, had worked for that venerable newspaper for 40 years, first covering politics but, starting around 20 years ago, focusing on all things digital ever since.

In fact, AllThingsD was the title of the blog and annual conference that Mossberg and his partner, Kara Swisher, ran for the Wall Street Journal until they started Re/code.net this year. The CEA Hall of Fame includes about 170 consumer technology pioneers who created key consumer technologies, like the telephone, FM radio, television, phonograph and even the first TV remote control. Mossberg, it appears, is the only journalist to be inducted so far.

“It is indeed an honor to be named to the Hall of Fame,” said Mossberg earlier this week from his home in Maryland. He honestly said he didn’t know much about the Hall of Fame. “I only recently learned that people like Edison and Tesla were in it. I am not even fractionally as important as those people, so it is a real honor.”

Well, maybe some of them. There are plenty of names that won’t mean much to the average reader, such as John Logie Baird and Andre Bley. But Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Ray Dolby, Lee DeForest and Alexander Graham Bell may ring familiar. There is one name that seems made up, but Philo T. Farnsworth is not only a real name, he is the man most closely identified with the invention of television, even called the father of television by many.

Even less well known is Yuma Shiraishi, who applied for a patent in 1979 for "a composite video signal recording and reproducing system also records and reproduces an audio signal after their conversion into a digital signal. The recording system converts an input analog audio signal into a digital signal and generates a synchronizing signal corresponding to a synchronizing signal of the composite video signal. There is a time-axis compression of the converted digital signal so that they do not exist in the period corresponding to the synchronizing signal." The patent was granted in 1981 to the man who made VHS possible.

But Mossberg needn’t be so modest. There are about 170 names in the CE Hall of Fame, many of whom would have, arguably, made less of an impact on consumer electronics.

According to the press release, “The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame was launched in 2000 to recognize the consumer electronics pioneers who have made significant and lasting contributions to the industry. Each year, a panel of industry professionals reviews nominations and selects a new class of technology inventors, company leaders, retailers and influential individuals for the Hall of Fame honor.”

“Influential” is where Mossberg fits in.

“A veteran of the Wall Street Journal for more than 40 years, Mossberg wrote about national and international affairs before launching his popular Personal Technology column in 1991,” according to the announcement, “Mossberg and colleagues continue to produce technology conferences that attract the best and brightest minds of the tech industry, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.”

They quote the Washington Post calling Mossberg a “one-man media empire whose prose can launch a new product...”

That is not much of an exaggeration. When companies come up with new gadgets, Mossberg is one of the few people to be given the new technology to use and review before it goes on sale, a fact that prompted Ken Auletta’s full-fledged profile of Mossberg and the iPhone in The New Yorker magazine in May of 2007.

“Mossberg’s ‘Personal Technology’ column, which anchors the front of the [Wall Street] Journal’s Thursday Marketplace section, is particularly powerful when it comes to judging innovation intended for the consumer market. The opening sentence of his inaugural column, 16 years ago, was ‘Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault,’ a sentence that Mossberg has since described as his ‘mission statement.’”

With all of the clout that Mossberg has in the digital world, the temptation to “sell out” and begin to hawk products for the hugely rich tech companies selling gadgets, but Mossberg’s reputation for integrity has dissuaded even the most venal of them. But don’t feel sorry for him; the same New Yorker profile gave some hint of the money that Mossberg got paid for his ethical principles by the Dow Jones & Company.

“Mossberg signed a four-year contract, two Journal sources told me, his annual compensation approached a million dollars. Mossberg refuses to discuss his pay; a friend with knowledge of the negotiations says that ‘pay has always been an issue at the Journal,’ and that Mossberg doesn’t want to be viewed as a ‘prima donna.’”

Mossberg said this week that money and his perennially good relationship with the Wall Street Journal had nothing to do with his decision to start his own company. He said they had plenty of notice that he and Kara Swisher were striking out on their own and their reasons had more to do with an entrepreneurial spirit they both share and his conviction that, in spite of being 67 years old, “I had another chapter left in me.” That chapter will be written at Re/code.net, the new Internet journal he and Swisher started in January. That was long after he’d already been approached by media outlets and venture capitalists started talking about an independent company for Mossberg and his partner.

“It has always been my feeling that many of the technology websites available didn’t have the same ethical standards that we have always had at the Journal or that other news media consider important. Kara used to write for the Washington Post and has the same standards that I have. We wanted to have a site with the journalistic ethics we know.”

Mossberg and Swisher were careful to fund their venture with only 49 percent of the company held by outsiders: one investment capitalist and NBC, so they can control the content of recode.net. So far, their staff consists of five writers in the Washington, D.C. area, six in New York and at least as many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

“I can’t imagine us growing to a staff of a hundred or more, but we do intend to have enough people to do quality work,” said Mossberg.

Re/code is described as an independent tech news, reviews and analysis site “from the most informed and respected journalists in technology and media.”

Re/code’s belief is that everything in tech and media is constantly being rethought, refreshed and renewed, so “Re/code’s aim is to reimagine tech journalism.”

Mossberg said they will continue to create the tech conferences they started with their AllThingsD[igital] site. Re/code is owned by the new, independent media company, Revere Digital LLC. The minority investors and strategic partners in Revere are NBCUniversal News Group and Terry Semel’s Windsor Media.

Mossberg and Swisher have been making the rounds of tech media outlets touting their new company, which, right now, has the feel of an old and trusted news source. Of course, it’s Mossberg and Swisher’s reputations that create that feeling. They are both betting that there is a market for honest journalism in the hyperbolic atmosphere of digital reporting.

That will keep him busy for a while but not too busy to come to Warwick on a regular basis. His mother, Rhoda, now 90 years old, still lives near Pilgrim High School. Mossberg is a member of the Pilgrim Class of 1965. At the school, he co-authored a column with classmate James Woods about high school that was published in the Providence Journal. Walt’s two younger brothers, Arthur, who teaches at CCRI, and Fred, who teaches English at Warwick Veterans Memorial High School, also live in Warwick. But, so far, he’s the only Mossberg in the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

It’s just too bad that the late Bob Shapiro, superintendent of Warwick Schools, isn’t around to hear just how important he was to Mossberg.

“There were many good, influential teachers we had in Warwick, and I am grateful to them all, and Mr. Shapiro was one of the best of them.”

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