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Kara Swisher: How Silicon Valley Tech Bros Ruined Media

nymag.com · 4,747 words · saved by 1 readers

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. In the early 1990s, I was a reporter at the Washington Post. Having just turned 30, I was the “young” person in the newsroom, so when the digital-media start-ups appeared, I got what many reporters looked at as the short end of the beat. They had no interest in understanding the massive changes that were happening. As I learned more, it often fell to me to explain what this newfangled internet was as if I were trying to explain a tree to a child. The Post did give me the space to report on a broad range of digital topics, largely because no one else would — including the many come-and-gone technologies, like CD-ROMs, that were heralded as “multimedia killers” but would soon be killed themselves. During that period, I made one prediction that started coming true much more quickly than even I expected. This was about the end of old media, starting with the destructi

Kara Swisher in Bluemont, Virginia, July 1997. Photo: Lisa Dickey This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. In the early 1990s, I was a reporter at the Washington Post. Having just turned 30, I was the “young” person in the newsroom, so when the digital-media start-ups appeared, I got what many reporters looked at as the short end of the beat. They had no interest in understanding the massive changes that were happening. As I learned more, it often fell to me to explain what this newfangled internet was as if I

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