I’ve met Walt Mossberg (left), the technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a couple of times during the years I spent as a technology reporter. He’s a pretty regular guy — and a helluva tech writer. Mossberg, New York Times columnist David Pogue and Times reporter John Markoff are, in my view, the three top tech writers in the mainstream press. They ‘get’ computer and Internet technology and while I think they’re optimists about technology adoption in general, they approach the subject with a great critical eye and with a strong sense that it’s the human beings who use this stuff that are the most important part of the story. Too often technology reporting gets caught up in techno-lust and a fascination with the gadget itself. But the best tech reporting — like any kind of reporting, in fact — is always about real, live people. Mossberg, Pogue and Markoff ‘get’ that, too.
The New Yorker’s media critic Ken Auletta has a neat piece in The New Yorker this week about Mossberg. If you’ve not been reading him regularly, I’d recommend him if you’re interested in computer use and Auletta’s profile is a good introduction to the man:
The opening sentence of [Mossberg’s] 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.”
Mossberg’s influence was felt almost at once. ..
A week after Eric Schmidt became the C.E.O. of Google, six years ago, he went to see Mossberg. “He had just written an article about Google,” Schmidt says. “I wanted to get his insights. He was very gracious in saying, ‘This is what works. This is what doesn’t.’ He’s seen everything.” Schmidt says of him, as one might of a wine writer, “He has a good nose.”