Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media
My front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe.
By Kara Swisher
n the early 1990s, I was a reporter at the Washington Post. Having just turned 30, I was the “young” person in the newsroom, so when the digital-media start-ups appeared, I got what many reporters looked at as the short end of the beat. They had no interest in understanding the massive changes that were happening. As I learned more, it often fell to me to explain what this newfangled internet was as if I were trying to explain a tree to a child.
The Post did give me the space to report on a broad range of digital topics, largely because no one else would — including the many come-and-gone technologies, like CD-ROMs, that were heralded as “multimedia killers” but would soon be killed themselves.
During that period, I made one prediction that started coming true much more quickly than even I expected. This was about the end of old media, starting with the destruction of one of its most important economic pillars: the classified ads in newspapers.