Kara Swisher warns news organizations need to ‘reinvent’ themselves amid existential crisis

By Oliver Darcy, CNN

New York (CNN) — Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

Kara Swisher is not shying away from her trademark tell-it-as-it-is MO.

As existential questions confront both the tech and media industries, the self-described raconteur is out Tuesday with a candid assessment of the moguls and companies making the decisions that shape the world. In her memoir, aptly titled “Burn Book,” Swisher takes no prisoners, offering readers a behind the curtain peek at the industry’s most powerful and ego-obsessed titans that she has reported on, and tussled with, over her decades-long career.

We spoke to Swisher on Monday to get her insight on some of the challenges facing the media and tech landscape today. Below is a Q&A, which has been edited for clarity and due to space constraints.

We are only two months into 2024, and it’s been an awful year for digital media. The Messenger shut down, BuzzFeed announced plans to slash another 16% of staff as it continues to try to find footing in a shifting landscape, and Vice laid off hundreds as it effectively converts to a small studio. What do you make of it all?

This was a long time coming. Let’s be clear: A lot of what’s happened is the fault of the media … it’s a fault of the media letting technology take the business — like really impact the business in ways they did not anticipate.

By not continuing to iterate and change cost structures, they’ve got themselves in a situation that was already headed that way from back when Craigslist collapsed the classified advertising business. Right? This isn’t fresh news that everything is going digital. It’s how do you make a business out of it in a new environment?

And they didn’t anticipate that these tech companies were going to get into media. They were going to become media. And they are media. They are entertainment. What is Instagram except entertainment? For them to just think they were huge techies as a big error.

You quote Steve Jobs in your book telling Rupert Murdoch, “The media industry is kind of screwed since the best technologists are working for people like me and not you.” Do you believe that this is still a problem handicapping media? If so, why haven’t legacy media companies been able to lure in top tech talent to improve their products?

Stock options. Nice and elevated stock, elevated prices that are not in line with the actual. Media companies do not get to live by the same anti-gravity rules that tech companies have been able to. And then they grew into their valuations, which made it worse. But media companies didn’t offer the same kind of upside. And so when you have upside of financial gain, you’re going to attract the best talent. It’s basic capitalism, right?

How much do you blame Big Tech for the disastrous state of media? First they cornered the advertising market, which news organizations had relied upon. Now they’re turning off the referral traffic hose. Oh, and their A.I. tech presents a big threat. Is it fair to see them as the villains in this story? Or is it the fault of news organizations for failing to adapt their business models quickly enough to the changing landscape?

Look, in every change in history, there is someone who had the legacy business and didn’t pay attention. And then there is someone who came in and ran rampant using different advantages over the landscape — and that’s what these people did. The mistake was to think they didn’t want your business, that they just wanted to help. Remember the “Twilight Zone” episode “To Serve Man”? It’s a cookbook! I kept saying, “It’s a cookbook, that they want to eat you!” And they’d be like, “No, they’re here to help us.” And I’m like, “They are not here to help you. They’re here to eat you.” It was so obvious to me.

The New York Times, and other legacy media organizations, have faced fairly intense criticism lately for how they are covering the 2024 race, particularly Donald Trump’s candidacy. Is the criticism valid?

I think some of it is. I think they’re the biggest dog in the media show right now — not a very big dog, by the way, but still dominant in news — and so people are going to criticize. And so everything is gonna be highly scrutinized. I do think they overprogrammed on [President Joe Biden’s] age. I think they don’t cover [Donald Trump’s] lunacy the same amount, largely because he says something crazy every five minutes. So, you become used to it. When some angry old man is shaking his fist at the internet, you ignore them. It’s not that Biden’s age thing isn’t valid, it certainly is. It’s just that there were a lot of stories.

You’ve covered some of the most powerful people in the world for years and years, which you go through chapter by chapter in your book. What mistakes do you see news organizations making when they report on billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman? Who is doing a good job?

I’m not sure why precisely we are listening to a hedge fund billionaires talk about diversity. I’m sorry. What’s the reason? Because he gave money to Harvard? I mean, it’s a news story that he attacks them. But otherwise, he’s just a rich guy mouthing off. The other day, Elon was talking about caesareans. I was like, why are we listening to him? Only because they’re rich are they’re allowed to say nonsensical things. If I started going on about hedge fund investing, you should laugh at me.

You write in your book, “Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that.” A.I. is the most frightening rapidly developing technology on the horizon. How much of a threat do you believe emerging A.I. products actually pose to the media industry? Tyler Perry has already come out and said he is halting his planned $800 million expansion after seeing what OpenAI’s Sora can do, expressing concern a lot of jobs are about to be lost.

I think everyone’s got a right to be nervous. And Tyler Perry is correct. I don’t know if this — prime time is not here yet, Tyler Perry. You know what I mean? This stuff is expensive. It will be a long time before they can really — it’s early into the game for this particular technology. Eventually, it will be inexpensive. Right now, it’s quite expensive. But he’s right to anticipate it. He’s right to worry. I just think he’s a little early.

Over the weekend, Adrian Chen published a harsh review of “Burn Book” for The New York Times that has made waves in the industry. What’s your response?

Oh, where can I begin? I think one of the things that drove me crazy is the idea I wasn’t tough enough. … Go back and talk to anyone. And once I got out of beat reporting — where you cannot be critical in the same way that he would have liked me to have been — I did. AllThingsD was quite critical. We wrote about Uber. We wrote about Google in 2003, about their monopoly. And you can go back and find these things. I wish he had. Oddly enough, PR people from these companies are like, “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but she drove us crazy.”

Secondly, the thing that I got my sources through my ex-wife is just factually inaccurate. I didn’t. I was a prominent tech reporter before I met her, so I don’t know how that worked. Did she telepathically send me sources before we met? And the other part is saying they liked me because I was an entrepreneur like them. I was at major newspapers for 10 years, until 2003. So I was doing it 10 years. So how did that happen? Why did they like me before? It was just irresponsible to suggest that. I’m sorry. It was just full of inaccurate — I don’t care if they don’t like my book. But I’d like them to tell me about whether they like the actual book and not the book they wanted me to write or fill [their review] with inaccuracies about my career. It’s just not true.

What hope do you have for the media industry moving forward? Is there hope?

Being entrepreneurial is critical to being in the media. We’ve got to reinvent ourselves with the right cost structures and the right size. You can have enormous influence. I haven’t worked for a big media company in years. I have lots of influence.

So there are all these opportunities to break free and do all these creative and interesting and impactful things. It’s just going to be at a different cost structure and with a different employee base. And that’s going to be smaller. I don’t know how to say it in a nice way, but it’s going to be smaller.

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