Media: "RIP Recode"

From Brian Morrissey's The Rebooting substack, March 9:

Thanks so much for reading. This week I wrote about the demise of Recode, a publishing brand I’ve long admired going back to its previous iteration as All Things D. Also, a new People vs Algorithms podcast about Substack’s future as a bundler, the blurry lines between ad business and protection racket, Airmail’s dubious subscription stats and the vindication of Jeeves. Big thanks to today’s sponsors, Omeda and Pressboard by Impact. On that note, get in touch if you’re interested in sponsorships partnerships: brian@therebooting.com.

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Recode’s missed opportunity
For all the implosions of publishing brands, the demise of most is a mundane affair in the bowels of corporate restructuring. Brands are milked for all their worth, cut to the point of plausibility and eventually disappeared quietly.

Such was the unfortunate fate of Recode, the tech media brand founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg in 2015, an early example of journalists striking out on their own. Recode itself was a successor to All Things D, the Wall Street Journal sub-brand that found the formula of influential journalists with personality, married to a lucrative conference franchise that attracted A-list CEOs who would willingly subject themselves to sometimes withering interviews. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg’s disastrously sweaty performance – Swisher had to urge him maternally to remove his hoodie –  apparently led him to take public speaking more seriously. 

All Things D was pioneering at the time. It was an editorial franchise that sprang out of an event, and adopted the snarky tone of the blogging era, married it with original journalism. The tone was conversational, particularly for the Journal, even if I could have done without so many of the shaky Flip camera interviews. 

Swisher and Mossberg were early examples of restive star talent, quarreling with News Corp over the spoils of the All Things D franchise and splitting off in 2013, taking most of the staff with them, to start Recode in 2015. Dow Jones bargained it could continue the All Things D brand without the star talent and found otherwise. 

Recode raised $10 million in venture funding only to sell to Vox Media after just 18 months, saying it could not compete in a scale era. That was only partially true, since Recode had the makings of a successful boutique business media brand, only the tenor of the times was all about scaling. Recode’s ultimate demise was an inevitability once  Mossberg retired in 2017 and Swisher went to The New York Times in 2018. It’s a hard sell that you’re committed to building a brand when you’re writing instead for the Times. Soon enough Recode was subsumed as a confusing, awkward sub-brand of Vox.com....

....MUCH MORE