Swisher to leave “Recode Decode” for NY Times podcast

New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

Nearly two years ago, we announced that Kara Swisher would be joining The New York Times as a contributor, bringing her fearlessness, intellect and wit to the Opinion report. We’re delighted to announce that she’s going to be bringing all of that to our listeners, too. On July 1, she will be leaving her “Recode Decode” podcast to begin producing a twice-weekly show that will make its debut in the fall under the banner of Opinion Audio.

Over five years as the host of “Recode Decode,” Kara has held hundreds of newsmaking interviews with nearly every major tech and media figure in the country. She has grilled Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Shoshana Zuboff and Kim Kardashian. New York magazine called her “Silicon Valley’s most-feared journalist,” and last year Adweek named “Recode Decode” the Podcast of the Year.

On her new podcast, she’ll continue her work holding major tech figures to account, while expanding her scope to a wider landscape of political leaders, regulators, C.E.O.s and important thinkers in science, culture and entertainment. She’ll interrogate people in power as well as those influencing the world from less traditional corners.

This new endeavor is part of Opinion’s continued expansion into audio journalism, which already includes “The Argument” and “The Choice,” a short-run series about the editorial board’s presidential endorsement. With the arrival this month of Paula Szuchman, Opinion’s new audio lead, we’ll have even more news to share soon. The newsroom has recently introduced a number of new projects as well, and the company recently acquired Audm, which has already produced several read-aloud versions of Opinion articles.

Kara started at The Washington Post, where she chronicled the dawn of the internet age in the early 1990s. She wrote two books on AOL that introduced readers to the emerging players before they became giants: “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web” and “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”

She moved to The Wall Street Journal as one of the early beat reporters covering the nascent internet industry. She created the Boom Town column to track the breakneck development of Silicon Valley. In 2003, she and her colleague Walt Mossberg created the All Things Digital tech conference, which became the gold standard for live journalism events. They also led a team of reporters to pick apart the tech industry at AllThingsD.com, on The Journal’s platform. In 2011, she won a Loeb Award for her live blogging of Yahoo’s earnings calls. Kara and Walt left The Journal in 2014 to create the Recode site and the Code Conference, which later became part of Vox Media.

Kara will continue to host the Code Conference and remain a co-host of the “Pivot” podcast with New York magazine.