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The Kingmaker

Walt Mossberg makes or breaks products from his pundit perch at a little rag called The Wall Street Journal.

Walt Mossberg is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him. The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his company's recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the author of the weekly "Personal Technology" column in The Wall Street Journal, he's used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells back, "I don't give a fuck about your stock price!"

In truth, Mossberg liked Panero's company, XM Satellite Radio, which beams more than 100 channels of music - rock, hip hop, jazz, country, you name it - directly to cars nationwide. The early reviews were enthusiastic, and investors loved the stock. But Mossberg hated the special radios that drivers needed to buy from the company to get the signal. In his column, he slammed the spotty reception and said the radios were poorly designed, hard to use, and too expensive. On the morning the column appeared, just five days before the conference opened, XM's stock fell 8.5 percent. Reuters reported that Mossberg's column was driving down the price.

Waiting for a flight back to Washington after the conference, Mossberg is eating a Burger King breakfast at Las Vegas-McCarran International Airport when Panero walks by. This time the entrepreneur is calm. The two men realize they're on the same plane and arrange to sit together in first class. (Mossberg got his ticket using upgrade coupons.) Once they're in the air, Panero admits that Mossberg is right about XM's hardware. A few months later, XM rolls out a new line of price-slashed radios with better controls for scrolling channels, plus larger screens for identifying the songs and artists. A year after the original review, in January 2003, Mossberg writes a column wholeheartedly recommending the new offerings.

XM is only one of dozens of companies that have redesigned products in response to Mossberg's unsparing criticism. RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures. Mossberg evokes comparisons to Robert Parker on wine and Frank Rich during Rich's controversial tenure as the Broadway critic of The New York Times. At least one grad school thesis has been written on Mossberg's clout. "He's one of the most trusted and influential voices in technology," says Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang.

Disarmingly bright, blunt, fervent, and combative, Mossberg was an investigative reporter for two decades before becoming a tech pundit, and he has a heady sense of his ability to keep the industry chieftains in check. His MO: posing as the champion of the "normal" or "average" tech consumer, though he's hardly one himself. Close friend and Journal reporter Kara Swisher calls him "a freakish geek."

Still, his success comes from demystifying the digital realm for readers who aren't regular Slashdot contributors. He's on a mission to remake the tech world according to his own fetish for simplicity, reliability, effectiveness, and great design. Chances are he has influenced the look, feel, and performance of your laptop, mobile phone, and MP3 player.

Mossberg's been a fiery crusader since the opening line of "Personal Technology," which debuted in 1991: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault." His quest has earned him legions of fans, but he's also angered many, who think he's arrogant, curmudgeonly, and subjective - and who wonder how deeply he understands the nitty-gritty of technology. His latest enemies: open source partisans, who chafed when he picked Microsoft Office over StarOffice, an open source darling.

The detractors and the wounded multiply, but Mossberg keeps expanding his valuable franchise. Unfazed by a 1997 heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass, he does three weekly columns in addition to a weekly appearance on CNBC's Power Lunch and a monthly column for Smart Money. And, with Swisher, he hosts D: All Things Digital, the annual $2,995-a-person, three-day executive conference in early June at the Four Seasons resort in Carlsbad, California.

When I visit Mossberg at the Journal's Washington bureau, a few blocks north of the White House, he's blasting Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" in his spacious private office. Friends say that Mossberg has three obsessions: music, Star Trek (he knows all the episodes and gadgets), and the Boston Red Sox. He's 57, a baby boomer who loves the Beatles, Motown, Paul Simon, Chuck Berry, James Taylor, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Lately his assistant, Katie Boehret, 23, and his son Steven, 26, who's trying to make it as a professional musician, have gotten him into newer music. He says he's "nuts" for Fountains of Wayne, and he likes Coldplay and John Mayer.

Mossberg holds an unlit cigar, which he'll carry and chomp on throughout the afternoon but never light up. Smoking isn't allowed at the office. He puffs $7 Cohibas (the legal Dominican ones) but buys cheaper brands for chewing. Like Steve Jobs, his wardrobe leans toward the monotonous. He favors Eddie Bauer oxford shirts with button-down collars, and Dockers or jeans. He may be a media big shot, but Mossberg's tastes aren't grand. He lives in an unremarkable house in Potomac, Maryland, that he's owned for 10 years. He drives a Mercedes, but it's a C-Class, which he describes as "the cheapest and smallest Mercedes, with an iPod velcroed to the dashboard and jacked into the audio system."

As we walk around the bureau, we come to a kitchen. Mossberg offers me a Diet Coke, puts a quarter into the vending machine, then hesitates.

"Is it going to bias you if I buy you a soda?"

I'm not sure if he's joking.

He takes me to Boehret's windowless office, which includes "the vault," a storage room holding the many unsolicited products they receive - and always send back after they play with them. An earlier assistant, James Hoppes, created a database to track all the stuff they get. "Every day was like Christmas," Hoppes recalls. "Big packages with cool gadgets." Mossberg keeps none of it. The product clutter is even worse at home. "Oh my God," says Edie, his wife, "the proliferation! Everything has to be sent back, so you can't get rid of the boxes. They grow like topsy. I say, This is it! Everything's got to go by Thanksgiving. Clear out the living room."

Back in Mossberg's office, he shows me his "computer museum": a wall of bookshelves filled with vintage machines. There's a Timex Sinclair 1000 (his first computer), an Apple IIe, a portable Apple IIc, a first-gen Macintosh, a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100, a Palm Pilot, an Atari 800. Mossberg was an early home-computing hobbyist, enraptured by the possibilities of technology but frustrated by its limitations. He souped up his Apple IIe by adding memory, one chip at a time, which amazed Edie. "This was a guy who wasn't mechanical in any way," she says. "He wasn't handy." Mossberg even tried to exchange text messages with Journal colleague Rich Jaroslovsky on 300-baud modems before the advent of online services.

Mossberg is interrupted by a phone call from a flack at Apple about his critique of the iPod mini, which will run in tomorrow's paper. The publicist is concerned that Mossberg will write about his prerelease model crashing, even though the problem has since been fixed in the final production version. He was the only reviewer to receive preproduction minis from Apple, which enables him to publish the first real review of the new gadget - an enviable scoop. Mossberg will mention the crash, but overall his column will be positive. "Tell Steve not to get upset," Mossberg says.

The star of The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of elite capitalism, comes from the working class. His grandfather toiled as an upholsterer. His father peddled dishes and blankets door-to-door to millworkers.

Mossberg discovered journalism as a teenager in suburban Warwick, Rhode Island, when he cowrote a weekly column about high school for the Providence Journal-Bulletin. (He collaborated with his best friend, James Woods, the future film star.) Mossberg relished going downtown to turn in his copy at the "old smelly newsroom with fans and peeling green paint," he recalls. "I was bitten by the journalism bug."

As a Brandeis student he protested the Vietnam War and campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primary. But already "he was focused on being a reporter," recalls dormmate Ira Shapiro. He spent summers covering crime and politics for the Providence newspaper.

He met Edith Marcus as a freshman in Politics 1A. They married the week after graduation and headed to Columbia University - Walt for a master's in journalism, Edie to Teachers College. The journalism students were assigned to "hang out" at publications between semesters. Mossberg ended up at The Wall Street Journal. "I had never read the Journal," he says. "My grandfather was a union organizer. We were workers." But the paper impressed him.

In 1970, Mossberg accepted a reporting job there for $9,000 a year. His ambition was to cover Washington, but the editors told him to name three smaller bureaus, promising he'd get one of them. He requested San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston. The call came back: "When can you be in Detroit?"

Sporting shoulder-length hair and long sideburns, Mossberg arrived at the Detroit bureau and took a desk next to another rookie, Norman Pearlstine (who became the Journal's managing editor a decade later). "He was whip smart," Pearlstine recalls, "and he typed faster with one finger than anyone I knew."

Mossberg's earliest scoop was uncovering that American Motors Corporation was going to announce the industry's first bumper-to-bumper warranty. When he asked AMC's executives for comment, they called the Journal's brass in New York and threatened to pull their ads if the story ran prior to AMC's big announcement. The managing editor told the Detroit bureau chief: Hold the story for one night so Mossberg can triple-check the facts, and then we'll run it even longer and with a bigger headline. AMC pulled its ads; Mossberg's bosses gave him a raise. "I learned about the power and integrity of a great newspaper and how it feels to report and write what you think is the real story," he says. "It was exhilarating."

In 1973, Mossberg moved to Washington, where he covered a series of beats over two decades: labor, energy, defense, and economics. After the Three Mile Island disaster, he searched through Nuclear Regulatory Commission records and uncovered similar problems at other atomic plants. During the Reagan years, he revealed classified documents about new weapons failing tests and busting budgets.

In 1987, Mossberg cowrote a front-page story on the stock market crash that prompted Treasury secretary James Baker to shut himself off from the press for three months. (The piece convincingly argued that Baker was in over his head when it came to economic policy.) When Baker became secretary of state under President Bush, Mossberg became the Journal's diplomatic reporter. "I flew around the world nonstop with Baker during tremendous upheaval," Mossberg says. "The end of the Cold War. The reunification of Germany. Moscow, Eastern Europe, then Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War."

The frenetic travel proved difficult on his family life. "We knew when he was leaving, but we never knew when he would be coming back," Edie recalls. In 1990, when Mossberg's sons were 8 and 12, he conceived of a new gig that would enable him to wield influence from home: a tech column. He had been captivated by computers and gadgetry for 20 years. As PC sales skyrocketed in the early '90s, he sensed a historic shift: "I believed that the tech market was about to broaden and democratize, and the column could catch the wave."

From its launch, Mossberg knew exactly what he wanted. "Personal Technology" would be utterly different from the reviews already out there: "They were by geeks for geeks, filled with jargon, condescending to nontechies, and reverential about the computer and the computer industry," he says. "I wanted to write for the nontech user and be critical of the industry."

Mossberg may have been clear about his new direction, but many of his higher-ups were not. "There was extraordinary resistance on all levels of Dow Jones [which owns the Journal]," recalls Pearlstine, who greenlighted the column and stuck by his old friend. "People said, We don't render opinions on our news pages, and who cares about personal computers?"

At first, he had to fight the perception that he'd dropped out of the race for power and influence. "Many Washington journalists I'd worked with, and some people in government, wondered if I'd been demoted," Mossberg says. "James Baker said, 'What the hell would you want to do that for?'"

But when it debuted on October 17, 1991, "Personal Technology" was an immediate hit. Mossberg's voice, amplified by the power of the Journal, resonated like no other. In 1992, he recommended America Online, an also-ran with only 200,000 subscribers, over Prodigy, the leader with 1.8 million subscribers and powerful backers, including Sears and IBM. "Prodigy tried to get me fired," he recalls. Mossberg's endorsement "really helped put AOL on the map," admits founder Steve Case. "It turbocharged our growth."

Mossberg's proudest moment came in 2001, when he objected to Smart Tags, a feature he tested in a beta version of Windows XP. Smart Tags could turn any word on a Web page into a link to a Microsoft property or sponsor's site without consent from the site's author.

Mossberg's column, which decried Smart Tags as a dangerous abuse of power, created an immediate uproar. Three weeks later, Microsoft executives leaked to Mossberg that they were killing the feature - and privately said that his column was why. "Walt was in heaven with that one," says Paul Steiger, who succeeded Pearlstine as the Journal's managing editor.

More recently, Mossberg blasted Intuit's TurboTax for "treating everybody like a criminal" by secretly installing a monitoring program on PCs to prevent piracy. So he urged his readers to buy the rival, Tax Cut. Intuit received hundreds of emails in response - and backed off.

He delights in his mission to "dress down companies when they need it." And he hardly seems daunted by taking on tech powers. "It was hard for me to imagine being afraid of the wrath of Gates or Jobs when I had been criticized by the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department."

His columns can be subjective - intentionally so. "In the late '80s and early '90s, the industry put a lot of pressure on the computer press to wring the subjectivity out," he says. "But there's no way to do a bar chart that shows that the Treo or the iPod is beautifully made and feels great in the hand."

The Mossberg brand is a vital franchise for the Journal, which has taken extraordinary measures to keep him. In 1997 - two years after Norm Pearlstine became editor in chief of Time Inc. - he tried to lure Mossberg to write for Time, Fortune, and Money. "It was a huge offer," Mossberg says, "just as my kids were starting to go to college." Paul Steiger told me that he approached Peter Kann, the CEO of Dow Jones, and asked if it could match Pearlstine's offer. That would have meant paying Mossberg more than Steiger himself earned. Nevertheless, Steiger pushed for it, even enlisting the support of the Journal's ad salespeople, who confirmed that Mossberg's credibility helped attract tech advertisers.

Kann approved the request, and Mossberg stayed. A published report says that Mossberg is the Journal's highest-paid writer, at $500,000 a year. Mossberg says the figure isn't accurate (but not whether it's high or low) and that he doesn't know what anyone else there makes. Pearlstine allows $500,000 "doesn't seem unreasonable" but that Mossberg "may be making more than that now."

Along the way, Mossberg has been a generous mentor to many younger writers. After admiring Kara Swisher's work at The Washington Post, he got her a job at the Journal. Mossberg even gave away Swisher at her wedding to Megan Smith, the former CEO of PlanetOut, in a waterfront ceremony in Northern California. "My father died when I was 5," Swisher explains. At the reception, Mossberg delivered a funny, moving tribute. Edie later told him: "Why couldn't we have had such a nice wedding?"

Mossberg has had two brushes with death. On 9/11 he left his hotel at the World Trade Center and took a taxi uptown a half hour before the first plane hit. In 1997, he had a major heart attack. It wasn't totally unexpected, Mossberg says. The men in his family have a history of heart problems that strike young.

In the hospital after his cardiac arrest, while awaiting bypass surgery, Mossberg lay in bed studying Web sites on the subject. "By the time he met the surgeons, he had read all about them," Edie recalls. They transplanted an artery from his arm to his heart in a quadruple bypass. When Mossberg returned to work three months later, "he seemed to come out of it very well," says Steiger. "His spirits were very strong and his health seemed much stronger."

Mossberg dieted and slimmed down to what one Journal staffer called "the sleek new Walt." His revitalization inspired confidence that he could maintain and even expand his workload. In addition to writing "Personal Technology" and "Mossberg's Mailbox," a Q&A feature, he launched "The Mossberg Solution" and, last year, the D conference. It helps that much of the research and product testing for "Solution" is done by Katie Boehret, who brings a youthful, unmonied, and female perspective to complement Mossberg's well-off aging male personality.

Her influence showed when Mossberg tested the Suunto PDA wristwatch this winter. The technology comes from Microsoft, where it was a longtime pet project of Bill Gates himself. But the watch is ridiculously large and clunky because it needs space for a screen. "I asked Katie, Would you date someone who was wearing this watch?" he says. "And she said, 'No!'" In his column two days later, Mossberg is unsparing: "In addition to the fact that the watches look ugly and cheap to me, they don't deliver really detailed information."

Mossberg has gotten overweight again, which concerns his friends and family. When I asked Edie how much the heart attack changed Walt, she blurted, "It should have changed him more. When you first come out of it, you're healthy, healthy! Now he slides back and forth." Mossberg admits, "I'm bad at diet and exercise."

He remains intensely driven. He writes his columns the day before they're published. (Now he types quickly with two fingers rather than one.) He has no backlog. He begins work at 7 am and often tests products at home at night and sends emails until 1 am.

The D conference - which Mossberg and Swisher staged for the first time last year - is the kind of new challenge he finds refreshing. It was named conference of the year by Conferenza.com, which reviews power schmooze-fests. The first year's speakers included both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who rarely have patience for these events anymore - and hadn't shared a stage with each other in many years. Other promoters would have to plead and bargain to land such big names; Mossberg just had to ask.

The conference drew a who's who of other marquee megaplayers: USA Interactive's Barry Diller, AOL Time Warner's Steve Case, eBay's Meg Whitman, Yahoo!'s Terry Semel, and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And Gates and Jobs are returning for a second time, despite the prospect of being interrogated onstage by Mossberg.

All this raises the possibility that Mossberg's objectivity and independence might be compromised by his close ties to top execs. Besides being chummy with them, he needs them to agree to appear at his conference. Doesn't that make him pull punches? Mossberg rejects the idea. Sure enough, he criticized Microsoft's clunky PDA watch in his column after Gates had agreed to serve as a leading attraction for the confab.

When Mossberg "launched "Personal Technology," Pearlstine wanted him to move to Silicon Valley. Mossberg refused to uproot his family. "How will you see all the new products?" Pearlstine asked. "I'll go there a few times a year," Mossberg responded, "but they'll come to me whether I'm in Juneau or Fargo, because I'm The Wall Street Journal."

He was right. CEOs and product designers visit him in Washington every week to demonstrate upcoming releases. Mossberg subjects them to probing interrogations. "If you want to pitch a product to Walt Mossberg, you better know everything about it," says Hoppes, his former assistant.

Naturally, some companies try to use their meetings with him to glean intelligence they can incorporate into products that he'll later review. Four years ago, he sent a mass email to the publicists who pitch him: "I am not a consultant or adviser for you. I am not part of your development process. Even when I receive prerelease software or hardware or an advance look at a site or service, I am not a tester. If I make opinionated comments or ask pointed questions during a meeting or by email or phone while trying out products, it is strictly to elicit information from you for my own journalistic purposes. I typically try to ask the questions and offer the reactions I imagine my readers would. I state my views strongly, but I never utter them in the belief I am some sort of consultant or guru, and you would be mistaken to look upon them that way."

Nonetheless, sometimes Mossberg does provide what amounts to free consulting. Hoppes, in his 2001 Georgetown master's thesis ("A Personal Technology Journalist's Influence on the Diffusion of Innovation - Case Study: Walt Mossberg"), reported that Mossberg stayed in touch with MusicMatch CEO Dennis Mudd after publishing his review "and still gives him advice about how to improve the product." Mossberg denies that.

Mudd told Hoppes: "His insights are exceptional. We really take them to heart. At one point we were using opt-out personalization. Walt shot me an email and let me know this was a big mistake, and recommended we should stay out of this gray area. We changed the policy per his recommendation. In hindsight, it was clearly the right thing to do." In his thesis, Hoppes concluded that "Mossberg sometimes has a direct hand in the design of a product." And how many former diplomatic reporters can say that?

Posted by thinkum at May 7, 2004 12:20 PM