Recode’s Swisher on the difficulty of the events business

Kara Swisher, cofounder of the tech news site Recode, talked with Aditi Sangal of Digiday about how the site makes money through events and is exploring other venues.

Here is an excerpt:

Events are difficult to grow
“Conferences are not a scale game. It’s like putting on a Broadway show. They can be very profitable, but our conferences are dependent on Walt [Mossberg], Peter Kafka and I. That’s a problem. But you can only do so many of those. It takes a while to make those. Scaling is hard, but it’s a nice little business.”

Pivoting to TV
“The way cable is set up is such a reductive screamfest. You learn nothing. I believe in substantive conversations. I was angry about the tech industry. I was very interested in the future of work. So I said, let’s talk to Google, Facebook and other people who are making the future. Let’s have town halls with real people. We don’t have to have solutions, but let’s talk. Because who is responsible? We’ll see if it works on TV.”

Read more here.