Swisher on the importance of covering tech’s impact

Kali Hays of Women’s Wear Daily interviewed longtime technology journalist Kara Swisher about her work and her new podcast at The New York Times.

Here is an excerpt:

WWD: With this newest podcast, you’re talking some broader issues now, it’s not tech focused at all. Is that something you’ve been wanting to do, move away from tech?

K.S.: Yeah. I’ve been moving out of tech for a while. In “Recode Decode” I interviewed all kinds of people. And I always feel like technology impacts everything. It’s sort of like, what did trains have to do with back in the day? Everything.

[Walter] Mossberg and I, we always understood the reasons we were successful is it wasn’t about the tech, it was about the impact of the tech. I remember him telling me when I started, (he’s the one that got me to The Wall Street Journal), he said, “Parachute in with cleats on when you do your journalism, that’s what you have to do to get noticed.” The more I thought about it…I remember thinking two things. One was, I’m not going to tell you how the watch works. I have to know how the watch works, but I’m just going to tell you what time it is — that’s the critical element of a watch, right? But people tend to tell you how the watch works when people just want to know what time it is.

Read more here.