I've been reading Walt Mossberg's column with great regularity for a long time (and quoting him on this blog for at least 4 years). His target audience is really more a person like my partner: she doesn't want to read overly technical expositions of the latest techno-gadget, she wants to know if it is any good. Mossberg supplies his opinion in clean uncluttered language, and as a bonus, has consistently been championing OS X over Windows XP (and Vista) for a while.
Plus he answers his own email.
Ken Auletta writes an in-depth profile in The New Yorker:
Annals of Communications: Critical Mass: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
[Walt] Mossberg’s “Personal Technology” column, which anchors the front of the 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, sixteen 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.”
as an aside, I sincerely hope Rupert Murdoch does not get his hands on the WSJ. Aside from the rabid-dog editorial page (which I nearly always just skip), and an occasional snarky neo-con slant to some book reviews or other popular culture pieces, the Wall Street Journal is an excellent newspaper. I shudder to think what would happen if the WSJ became part of News Corp.
Technorati Tags: media, Techno-babble, Technology, Telecom
Mossberg is not shy about expressing his opinions. He helped recruit Kara Swisher from the Washington Post in late 1996, and encouraged her to move to Silicon Valley. When she and Megan Smith, a Google executive, decided to marry, Swisher told me, her mother “was troubled by the idea of a gay wedding.” She and Smith have two children, and she recalls that when she came home with the first baby Mossberg was there, and so was her mother, who “really likes Walt a lot.” Swisher went on, “We were having dinner and she was being difficult—she was arguing with me. I was getting really uncomfortable. Walt took her down like I’ve never seen anybody take anybody down: ‘How dare you talk to her like this? This is an important issue and you have to be supportive no matter what as a parent.’ My mother was just shocked—he was relentless in not letting her off the hook.”
