Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters
Jon Swartz, Senior Content Writer, Techstrong Group
In more than three decades covering technology, John Swartz has met a lot of people: engineers, journalists, CEOs, and he's got a story for all of them. As a student at San Jose State, he was part of a newspaper staff that was led by AP's Mike Lidke and included at least a half dozen other pioneers in tech journalism. As a reporter for 17 years at USA Today, he witnessed online advertising's slow but inevitable impact on a once major newspaper. And as a reporter today at TechStrong Group, he's covering AI from a skeptical but hopeful perspective.
John joined us to tell us about his engineer father's influence on his career, the good old days of tech trades, and just a few of the stories he has about all those people he's met over the years for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including John. Here's our chat with John. Enjoy.
In more than three decades covering technology, John Swartz has met a lot of people engineers, journalists, CEOs, and he's got a story for all of them. As a student at San Jose State, he was part of a newspaper staff that was led by AP's Mike Lidke and included at least a half dozen other pioneers in tech journalism. As a reporter for 17 years at USA Today, he witnessed online advertising's slow but inevitable impact on a once major newspaper. And as a reporter today at TechStrong Group, he's covering AI from a skeptical but hopeful perspective. John joined us to tell us about his engineer father's influence on his career, the good old days of tech trades, and just a few of the stories he has about all those people he's met over the years for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including John. Here's our chat with John. Enjoy. John, thanks so much for uh joining us on the show. Really appreciate having you. Thanks for having me. So you are, uh per usual, uh speaking to me from a hotel room. I am speaking to you from a hotel room, such as the life of a PR person and a journalist. You're in uh Vegas yet again. So we'll get to the show.
Jon Swartz:That's my second home. Yes. My second home. My second home that I that I dread going to, but I am here, yes.
Dave Reddy:Right. Yeah. Well, you get to a certain age, right? I will we'll get into your travels in a bit, but I I let's start with as we typically do. So you grew up in Silicon Valley. Perhaps you were destined to be a tech journalist. Where exactly did you grow up?
Jon Swartz:So I grew up in uh Almaden Valley, which is on the border of San Jose and Las Gatas. My dad worked at IBM for 20 years. He worked in the uh Cottle Road Laboratories. And he worked there, yeah, he worked there in the 60s and the 70s. The security was so tight at this lab that they wouldn't allow family members into the lab, even when I was like five years old. I couldn't go in. So I to me it was like this big mystery. It was like working for the CIA as far as I was concerned. And my dad traveled all he traveled all over the world. He worked on the Winchester disk drive uh project. He was a hardware engineer. He uh was uh a brilliant guy who was consumed with his job. And I think, in a sense, he passed that on to me. I inherited his his work habit, his worth habits and ethics and uh his drive. And I became kind of immersed in my job too. And uh I he very he had a great huge influence on me. I mean, he was exposed to a lot of people back when he was at a company called Macstore that he started. He had a couple of guys named Steve come in and ask for some equipment to be given to them for free. And they were both these hippies, they were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and he he gave them the products and he said, you know, these guys will never unmount anything. So again, my dad, you know, he was he worked at IBM, so maybe that was part of the reason why he didn't see what was going to happen. But yeah, I he just passed away. He passed away a few months ago, so it still resonates with me, but get a huge influence on my interest in in what goes on in Silicon Valley. And I saw it very up close, and I saw through some of these larger-than-life characters that he worked with or he interacted with.
Dave Reddy:Well, I'm sorry to hear of his passing, but it certainly sounds like his legacy lives on in you. I would presume that being around him in IBM might have triggered an interest in tech, or is that more of just being in Silicon Valley?
Jon Swartz:Well, see, one of the things my dad did was uh he had a we lived in this house with a two-car garage and he turned it into a laboratory. So he had all these electronic devices, he had a surveillance camera, he built a dark room in there because he was a very, he was a very good, accomplished photographer. So he would be running uh speed tests of the drive, a floppy drive. He uh would constantly be tinkering with things. He liked to rebuild engines and cars, he liked to design homes and build them. So he did all these things. And, you know, whether I wanted to or not, he would enlist my brother and I to help him. And at certain times I kind of resented it because I was like free slave laborer. He used to joke about this, right? But I learned a hell of a lot from him, like how to lay a foundation of cement for a house, how to work on plumbing and electricity. I mean, I have absolutely zero mechanical skills, but through uh, I don't know, trial and error, I learned how to do a lot of this stuff. And, you know, it he taught me how to solder, which I think is there's an art to doing that, and I actually enjoyed doing that. But it it was you know, he he had this kind of romantic lifestyle to me. He was always traveling, he was always in New York, or he was in Asia in particular, he was in uh Thailand, Japan, China. He spent a lot of time commuting there, and you know, he just told me these stories about what would happen, where technology was going. I mean, he had a very good idea of what the type of world we would live in, and he would share this with me. He also loved science fiction, so I'd watch science fiction films with him. His favorite film, and actually one of mine is uh 2001, and we saw that together. He took me to the theater to see that with my brother. Wow, it was a double bill, and I'm gonna I I'm ashamed to tell you this, but it was 2001 and a clockwork orange. I was like okay, yeah, I mean it was a little over the top, right? But that's double Kubrick, right? It was Kubrick and Clockwork Orange was banned. I lived in England later and it was banned there for years, you know, because of the violence and the yeah, yeah, yeah, right? It was like a terrible social, social story. That's a whole lot of Kubrick in one afternoon. Yeah, I know. It was a little much, it's like five hours. And my dad, uh, you know, I I saw that movie with him up until he died. I saw I would see that movie with I saw that movie with him at light at least 10 times, and I think near the end, he my father couldn't see, he was blind basically. And so he would just listen to it because he loved classical music, and I would explain to him sometimes, oh, here's the scene, but he could hear it. There were there's not a lot of dialogue in 2001. The first 27 minutes of the movie, I believe, there is no dialogue. That's right. The apes, and then and then there's the space, the vista of the space, and the and the classical score, and it's just like this opera, and then it then it devolves into like just minimal length, minimal dialogue. And he was my dad was from the Midwest, he was from Kansas, so he left as soon as he could because he said he didn't want to be a ditch digger when he was in his 20s. So he came out to California and he went to school at San Jose State in engineering, got his degree, and never looked back. He just wanted to do something different, and uh he was a self-made man, but also because he was from the Midwest, he was a man of few words to most people. I mean, there the people he talked to, he would talk to almost too much. He loved to talk, but he only selected certain people to talk to because he was kind of withdrawn, like some of these engineers are. I was gonna say he was in his own world, right? He's kind of a little bit on the spectrum where and if you couldn't connect with him, then there really wasn't much you could talk with him about. And I kind of find it that helps me actually when I interview people in tech industry because I know how to get to them. I think I know how to communicate with them on their level, because for the most part, some of these guys, mainly guys, are hard to uh they're hard, they're they have a hard time articulating what they want to do with rare exception. This is why I will always have a job.
Dave Reddy:Now I'm curious, given your father's your father's pride and and his long career at IBM, he he must have put together, or you all must have put together the notion that Hal was, you know, one let Hal H A L was direct from IBM, Hal is uh IBM, right?
Jon Swartz:Off by one letter, right?
Dave Reddy:Right. So for those who've never seen 2001, first go watch it. And uh second, there's an evil computer named Hal. And if you do the if you do the letters, Hal is one letter removed, H I A B L M from IBM. So a little bit of a lot of different things.
Jon Swartz:And that's that thought that thought permeated Silicon Valley for a long time, too. I mean, that's what created Apple, and I think what created Microsoft. That's like the whole story of Silicon Valley to me, is that there are these tech behemoths that are created. Right. And they then they they start off as these noble, like visionary uh discovery vehicles. And then they get big, and then they become like any major business. They become too big and they start doing things that we object to. Like history keeps repeating itself. So then what happens is there are a group of, this is like a Star Wars movie. There's like a group that want to attack the evil empire, so they create their own company, and then they become big, and then there's a next wave like Google that comes along to become the anti-Microsoft, and they all all end up becoming the same type of and so we see it through different iterations, we see it through things like the Mag 7, Fang. I heard of something called Mango. Have you heard that? Is that's Mango's that's the new the new the new powerhouse? So it's Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI.
Dave Reddy:OpenAI. Okay, Mango. All right. Well, I I've been I've been saying Fang and trying to figure out Fang plus M for a long time. So now I will go with Plus Fang. Yes. That's interesting. So Apple's no longer. Okay, whatever.
Jon Swartz:Oh, Apple, well, we can talk about Apple. I I I spend most of my life writing about them. So I, you know, it was like Misery Loves Company. And after a while, I just uh up in uh God, it's far back when I was at USA Today. We used every Apple event, they would invite like eight of us to these things. And I remember the last several years I'd go to it, I would just say, this is just like an iteration of nothing new. There's nothing here. And I just it's it's gonna be interesting to see where they go. We can talk about that later.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, yeah, pretty soon actually, because at first I want to talk about so you you're a a San a proud San Jose State Spartan. I see you and Mike Lickey of the AP on Facebook all the time at all sorts of sporting events, particularly Spartan uh football.
Jon Swartz:We go on trips together. We we go on we went to uh we've gone to uh we went to DC to see San Jose State play Navy, we went to Miami. That was a Raiders Dolphins trip, but we've gone to uh LA several times to see USC play them. I also went to Georgia, by the way. So I've so I I went to a a real like SEC powerhouse school, like a real college football team, and then the Spartans, which are Mike, Mike refers to the Spartans as like the Oakland A's of college football. And I think there's a lot to be said there. They're underfunded, they're underdogs, which makes them very appealing. And I actually was taught, I actually I talked to Mike quite a bit. I've Mike's a huge music fan, so we we go to music events together, we go to sporting events together. I've known each other, he was my editor when I was in college on the school paper. No kidding. We've known each other since the day. Is it the spider? I've known him since I was I've known him since 1982, January 1982. I met him. I also, you know, the another guy who was pretty well known and who unfortunately passed away was Tom Quinlan, was part of that same staff. He went to the Merck and was doing extremely well, and he abruptly died of a heart attack, I believe in 2000. He was only in his mid-40s. He just started a USA Today and I was on the East Coast, so I got the word through Julie Pitta, who was also on that staff. She worked at Forbes. So Julie and I worked together at Forbes for a while. She worked at the LA Times for a while. She got out of journalism to go in-house and write and you know raise a family. But there was uh quite a group of folks who were all on the same staff back in 1982 for a school newspaper. And you know, several Mike and I stuck it out. So did Julie. There were some a few other people, but the you know, in in this area, back in the early 80s and up through the end of that decade, the only jobs you really could get if you're a reporter were at a really small paper or your general assignment, which I did in Scotts Valley, or you work at a trade magazine. So I worked at a place called Macweek, which people loved. And I was part of that original staff there. I worked there twice. I worked there when it first started, and uh, in terms of design, it was an amazing place. Uh I worked with uh a bunch of talented people, a lot of people who used to write for Rolling Stone worked there. And then I left to go to England, where I worked for the Independent and wrote for some other places, and I worked at a trade. And then I came back and a guy named Dan Farber, who is the speechwriter for Mark Benioff, was my editor the second time I was there. So I worked off and on there for like six years until I got a job with a chronicle. It was it was a fun ride, but tech tech reporting at trades was the way you could get a job. If you could write, you could get a job at one of these places. But then you had to learn on the fly. You had to hit the ground running. And it would to me was overwhelming, to be honest, for the first few years. It was just uh it was a whole new world. But you know, that whole trade journalism route was a path many people took from places like InfoWorld, Mac Week, Computer, uh, what was it, Computer Weekly, Computer World, I'm sorry, uh, PC Week. People like that ended up going to the mainstream media. I think Markov was one of them. He went from the from InfoWorld, I mentioned it to New York to the Examiner, I believe, and then to the New York Times. I went from Mac Week to the Chronicle. There were a bunch of us, Carolyn Saeed, who was at the Chronicle for a long time. I worked with her at Mac Week for a long time. There's this whole pattern that just this went on. It's all very incestuous. But you know, my but going back to Mike, I mean, Mike is a very dear friend. I was just talking to him last night. I I talked to him quite almost all the time. I just saw him at a Stanford game a few weeks ago. And uh he is a to me, he is, and I've never told him this, but I think he's the best deadline writer, one of the best I've ever seen. You gotta be if you're to work at the AP. Yeah, that's why he works at the AP. It's perfect. I sat next to him at press conferences where he's not only writing a story about the press conference, he's got a second screen up and he's working on a second story.
Dave Reddy:That's amazing.
Jon Swartz:I've never I've never seen that.
Dave Reddy:That's a skill you can't teach, I think. Mike may Mike might tell us otherwise, but my guess is he was just born with that ability.
Jon Swartz:Bill, he worked, he was an intern at the LA Times and he he was like a sports writer. You can ask him this. He was a sports writer when he was in high school and he covered the Dodgers for some small paper. Yeah, that's awesome.
Dave Reddy:So back to Mac Week. So this is something we don't really have today. I mean, obviously, I believe Mac Week may still exist online, but the what I know it's gone.
Jon Swartz:It's totally gone. Oh, it's totally changed. It's so I was there, it started in the 80s. It was a guy named David Ezekel, who just passed away, unfortunately. He was a really interesting guy. He went to Woodstock. He was at that show. He's kind of a hippie, he was a deadhead. He created this publication with a guy from Rolling Stone who I didn't really know that well. And then there was uh the publisher was uh Michael Chong, who is in the publishing industry for a long time. I think Michael lives in Las Vegas now. They started this idea of like Rolling Stone meets like the like info world, except it's more readable. And they would do celebrity interviews in a trade magazine. A lot of they were at the beginning, you know, to give you an example, we had two artists who worked with us uh on special projects. One was Peter Max from the Yellow Submarine Fame. Yeah, yeah, and then the other was oh, Keith Herring. Oh no, Keith! Yes, I wish I still had the shirt. He made a specially designed shirt for us, and then uh Max made a poster, and this was with Macweek. And by the way, Macweek was considered like so kind of under the radar, quasi-cool, and I I I dare say that. I don't mean to to say it was like some some great shakes, but the show Moonlighting, there was there was a scene where there's a Mac Week mug. So if you if you to get a Macweek mug, you had to give us a great tip for Mac the Knife, which was our gossip column. So just between us, I used to edit it and I used to help write it. So you were it was it was it was the state, it was like Spencer Cat at PC Week. Right. And so at one episode of Moonlight, Moonlighting with uh Bruce uh Willis and what was her name? Oh gosh, I just went blank on her name. She's beautiful, yes, exactly. Simple Shepherd. They had a close-up of somebody's desk with the Mac Week mug on it during one of the episodes, and somebody had probably given given us a tip. That's the only way they could have gotten the mug is through giving us a tip about Apple. And the the irony was that the greatest source of material when we got tips from Apple was from Apple. So Jean-Louis Gasset, who used to be the president of Apple products, he was like a sieve. He would like he would just filter all sorts of shit to us. And to the point where when when when jobs took over, one I I've heard this, I'm not sure if it's true, but he he wanted all advertising that was associated with Apple or anyone closely associated with Apple cut off from MacBook because he was so pissed off at all the stories that we would get. Like he wanted to kill the he wanted to kill the company, kill the magazine because it was it was getting so many scoops. And you know, he was a control freak. And no, it was it was a fun time. It was a fun time. There were a guy, there was a guy, one of the best reporters I ever worked with is a guy named Bernard Burn Bernard O'Hannion who works who worked for Mother Jones. He's worked for a lot of places. He was this great kind of Berkeley, he went to Berkeley, he was this great kind of revolutionary, very almost borderline socialist reporter. I I was greatly interested in the world. Well, he did write for Mother Jones, so I would hope he was a socialist. Yes. And you know, another guy who I who I I was kind of a mentor to, or I I got I I considered him like a guy I hung out with and we was uh John Patel before he started Wired was on Mac Week staff, and we would go to we would go to shows together, we would write stories together. It was uh it was like a great time. It was so much fun. I mean, it was just you got to travel, you got to meet all these interesting people who are having a this huge impact on the world, and and it was all totally different era. It was like such a positive era, and like the kind of corrosive times we live in now. I mean, I I don't want to sound like the guy, you know, on the front lawn, but I just think the tech industry has changed so much and not in in not entirely for the better. And I'm right, I'm I'm so disappointed on so many levels with what's going on right now. I absolutely hate the way these guys go on bended knee to get their little favors and curry, curry uh, you know, a nod from the king. It's just to me, it's just it's it's absolutely sickening, and I understand why most of the country hates the tech because I I've I've kind of adopted their same behavior and the same type of attitude. It's just it's all the industry got too big, it got too greedy and too powerful for its own good. But I think that happens with a lot of industries, and it just eventually, inevitably, was going to happen with tech, and it and it has, and it's it's it's gotten even more grotesque with AI than than I've ever seen it before.
Dave Reddy:We'll go to AI in a second. I I I wanted to talk to you about, I mean, you know, these these early sort of halcyon days where you met a lot of people, you learned a lot of things, and you talked about the changes in tech. You know, tech obviously changed journalism, and not necessarily for the better, because you know, there's no tire ads, there's no car ads, there's very little print, and we're and the journalists, uh the journalism industry is still trying to figure out how to monetize. I how much, and I'm gonna I want to get into this with with USA Today too, but how much have we lost because folks like you the at who who are you know coming in now don't have an opportunity to learn the craft at a Mac Week or I I know InfoWorld is still around, but at a larger, you know, at some sort of other trade pub, you know, that just doesn't seem to be on the table anymore.
Jon Swartz:Yeah, no, it's not. I mean, it's uh it's it's so hard, first of all, to get in the field. I really I do feel I feel as if I was at the tail end of the glory era of uh journalism just in general. I mean, when I was at the Chronicle, I wasn't at the I was not at the Chronicle very long. They recruited me. There's a guy named Pim Fox who does Bloomberg, who used to do Bloomberg TV. I'm not sure if he still does it. He was a business editor. He and uh Mark Hall, who was my editor at the at Mac Week, Mark Hall was the greatest boss I ever had. In fact, I felt so strongly about what a great guy Mark Hall was that he and I went to Redmond once to do an interview with Bill Gates, and we're in the office, and Bill Gates is, you know, he you know, he likes to give and take, right? So he likes to learn things as well as teach things, which I found very admirable. And at one point he talked about what makes a great boss. And I used to turn next, I I this this was not there was no ulterior motive because Mark Hall is my will always be my friend. And I used to turn to him, I said, this guy next to me is a great boss, and here's why. And Mark got really embarrassed because he's just a humble guy. But I said, you know, it's about not only teaching somebody something and and bringing out the best of them, but Mark Hall wanted me to leave to go do something better. He goes, I because it's a legacy, because if you leave here, I'm not gonna resent you. If you go somewhere as a higher profile and it's a better place, that reflects well on me too. And I was like, you get it. And I wish there were more people like that, you know, who were confident, they enjoyed what they did. The Chronicle, when I worked there, I wasn't there very long, but I gotta tell you, when I was here, I would walk in the hallways, you'd see uh Herb Cana just won a Pulitzer. Remember just like talking to him, or uh Ellen Temko, who was the architect predict, who was he was a Pulitzer, I think he won as well. I would the people I was on staff with were amazed. The staff I was on, there was Julia Anguin, who went to the journal. I believe she won a Pulitzer Prize, and she uh is a pro-Publica. She was there, she started, helped start that. There was Deb Solomon, who's the economics editor or was at the New York Times. She was at the journal. There was uh a bunch of people who went to Barron's, there were um, there were a number of people who went to the journal, and uh I eventually I went with another guy to Forbes. It was I learned from them, and you know, I was I was always used to be the youngest person on every staff. And when I was there, I was in my early 30s, and they they took me under their wings and they would point out what they liked, but they also told me what they what they didn't like, and but it was it was done in a constructive manner though, and they were saying that.
Dave Reddy:And I think that's what's missing.
Jon Swartz:I think that's missing. They were mentors, and and I don't see I mean, even at USA Today, when I was there, I was always hoping that I could work with younger people. And I most of the people there weren't that young, but the those who were younger didn't seem to didn't seem eager or interested in learning from people who had experience, like they were so uptight about just filing their story and getting the hell out of there. And at the at the near at the Chronicle, it was all about sharing your stories, sharing your sources, like kind of brain brainstorming ideas, which I really liked. There people just throw constant ideas at me. So I've just had a whole notebook. I started files on this coyote system. I had like 20 story files in progress, like different stories that I intended to work on that at various stages. And I would just eventually, when the news happened that was applied to that story, I had like the shell of a story written. And I later found out, and it's actually confirmed to me when I was at Forbes that that companies kind of think that way too. So, of all people, so I'm at Forbes in early 2000, it's actually 1999, I believe. And I've got this friend of mine who used to work at PR at Apple, Cindy McCaffrey, and she says to me, Hey, there's this company called Google, you gotta really meet this guy, Sergey. You gotta meet him. I was like, I don't know. It's like another one of these stupid. So I I reluctantly agree. He comes in, you know, he's pretty shy. And he's and he we're we're in this uh we're in this office at Forbes, which is in Burlingame, which overlooks SFO, right? It's right by that former drive-in. So we're looking out, he's just looking out the window, watching the planes land. And I'm saying to him, What why are you watching the planes land? And he said, you know, there's like a certain rhythm to it. You notice that? Like, you know, you work on projects, you work on things at work. There's some things that need to be done today, some things need to be done next week, and things a month from now. So you plan it like an air traffic controller, and it was like, oh, right. I I kind of do that sometimes because that's a good way of doing doing things. So you're always prepared, you multitask as much as you can, but you always think about how these things fit together in a in a time continuum. And that was one of the smartest things anyone told me. And I just like you almost kind of said it matter-of-the-and I use that template. I mean, I kind of did before, but he he kind of cemented for me this idea of multitasking and the importance of not being in the the here and now, but thinking about the future and how things apply to the future, or even looking back to the past and how they relate to the past. I mean, these are all like learning moments, and I I just don't know if people are under that have that luxury of time anymore to do any of this. They're all under so much pressure to overwrite, just churn out as much as possible. You know, they're they're worried about their jobs. I I, for the most part, until the last few years, I never really worried about my job security. And I just, it was a totally different time.
Dave Reddy:Let's talk about the second and perhaps longest chunk of your career, at least to date, which which was the 17 years you spent at USA Today. And and I know that paper, it took hits from the day it came out. I was a kid, I loved it because it gave me, I was this kid on Cape Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Suddenly I had access to a national sports page. I was a big sponsor.
Jon Swartz:Oh, you get the box scores. They were the first to write, push that.
Dave Reddy:Yeah. And then I went I went to school in Washington and I was an out-of-town guy. So now rather than having to read 20 pages of Redskins coverage every day, even in the middle of March, I was able to go get it, get a newspaper that would at least give me something about Boston sports. So it was a must-read. And then I got into PR and it was a must pitch. It was like there was the big 12, and they were, and you were there for 17 years. The physical paper was was really strong. The website did is still up there and doing solid, but it's not what it used to be. And then, of course, you were part of a layoff in 2017. How much of a loss was that? To me, that, and not to put words in your mouth, but to me, that's like that that is the the shining example of the newspaper that died because of technology.
Jon Swartz:Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's it's uh Google and Facebook really killed it with the advertising Craigslist. The irony is that Craig Newmark really loves newspapers. And he was actually he was actually a good source and he was a very friendly guy, but I think this guts him, the fact that he, in a sense, started the death of this industry that he really did like. And I think it kind of haunts him to this day. Yeah, so I'm gonna I started in 2000. So back in so the paper started, I believe, in 1982 or thereabouts. Correct. And you know, I I I vowed never ever to read it or to me, it was like that it was a devil incarnate, you know. So I was like, I don't I don't want to have anything to do with this publication, which was funny because at Macweek they love the design of USA Today. And then and so anyway, so fast forward to 1999. I have left the Chronicle and I went with a colleague to Forbes. USA Today tried to recruit me away from the Chronicle as soon as I started because they needed another person in Silicon Valley and I was covering Apple, and I was I got a I got a story about Steve Jobs returning to Apple. So that was like the I broke that story and he denied it and then he went back, of course. Yep. He so so I Wait, wait, Steve Jobs lied to you? Is that what you're trying to say? Oh, yeah, he would never do that, would he? He would always be honest. They're all all these guys are such sterling examples of honesty and integrity. Sorry. All right, but okay. Uh yeah, I'm just being a little tad facetious. But um Tad. We like that on Crestomatic. Yeah, it was a little snarky. But you know, uh so I I just I I back then I was like, you know, I just started this newspaper, the Chronicle, you know, they gave me a break. I'm gonna be loyal to them for a few years at least. And so I dismissed it. And then my a friend of mine who worked at USA Today said, hey, you should join here. This was like in 2000. And I was at Forbes, and Forbes to me was like it didn't at the time, I think it totally did not understand the tech industry or Silicon Valley. It thought everything was a everything was a was so negative and such a failure because it was an East Coast publication that totally did not understand the the Silicon Valley ethos. And at the on the flip side, Fortune did. I think Fortune did an outstanding job, right? They they got it. So Forbes, forbes I thought I was just like so caught up in in its name and oh, we're Forbes. So I I ended up ended up going back to I ended up going to USA Today in 2000. They they uh they had a big recruiting class, and there was a guy who I ended up writing a book with named Byron Akihito who went to pull us through at this yeah, Seattle Times, right? He went to pull us on the Boeing coverage of the Bretterfin. And he uh he uh he and I started around the same time. There are a number of other people, they they they they put together like all these like I thought really good reporters. And so for the first, I'd say day, for like the first five to seven years, first five to eight years, I was at USA Today. They wanted to do stuff that went beneath the surface that wasn't superficial. And Byron and I ended up do working on this project involving cybersecurity, and we ended up doing a book in 2008. We for a couple of years, I guess, put us on this project, and we just do these. We did one story that was 4,000 words that was in the paper. And the one thing I always like, yeah, it was like the entire paper. It's it started on the front page and jumped twice inside. It was like what the LA Times does. And wow, I remember, I remember we were so proud of that, that the fact we were able to pull that off, and we did a lot of long stories. And in fact, we did uh I thought the stories that we did were were like so interesting that, in my opinion, and I I usually don't I don't vouch, I don't really pump up my stories, but I think that what we did was so ahead of the curve that in a sense Wired would run excerpts of our book. So did Computer World at the same time. And and I and we we got we got a multiple awards for this thing. We uh we we were finalists for the loeb. We lost to a New York Times project that won the the one the Pulitzer Prize, unfortunately, unfortunately for us. But we we we had such a great time doing it. And I always remember after that 4,000-word story, which was like a magnum opus for us, a guy back east, very nice guy, said to me, Hey, congratulations. You got that story in. It'll never happen again. That was and I remember just thinking about that, and I was thinking, okay, I'll I'll stay at this paper for a decade, then I'm gonna get out. And then we had a new editor who came up came aboard to resuscitate things. It was Dave Callaway, who ran Market Watch. He and Larry Kramer, who are like this tremendous tandem, they came and reinvigorated the paper. And Dave said, John, they did it, they did a they did an assessment. You know, they they came in and they talked to a bunch of people at all the different bureaus and they decided what they were gonna do moving forward. They did kind of like this accounting review, and they eventually said, We we want you to be the tech editor. We know it's gonna be a lot of work and you're gonna be overwhelmed, but we're gonna help you with resources, we're gonna hire people, we're gonna re-rallocate, give you the sources. They they were absolutely right about that, and that made me stay another five years. So by the 15-year mark, there reaches a point where you work somewhere where you're thinking, I can't reinvent myself much more anymore. I talked to Kevin Maney about this, he he was always gave me great advice advice. He was great, and he'd say, you know, you got to reinvent yourself every five years or so. And by then, I noticed Dave, by 2014, we weren't getting access that way we used to. I remember for a time it was just like three publications had access to jobs at every event, and we were one of them. We were always third. We it was the journal, the times, and us, and then then they would fill in the last two slots with rotating reporters or publications. That it just he got sick, of course, and he died in 2011. But I think beyond that, it we just weren't on the short list to me, at least. It felt as if we didn't have the access. It was and you could see it coming, you could see like the Verge was the new shiny toy. There were other pubs that were doing doing well, and they were more specialized and they were better. I mean, I'll be honest, better coverage. You know, then we got at USA Today, we got stuck in this trap of trying to run and chase SEO and and traffic, and it was just like this kind of downward spiral. Yeah, yeah, and it and you know, 2008-2009, the financial crisis just killed the paper. They started they started instigating layoffs, they started initiating those. So by the time I was laid off, there had been like 12 rounds, maybe. There had been furloughs where we worked without pay, or we took time off without pay. I'm sorry. We didn't work there, we weren't allowed to work during a furlough. We did about I did at least three of those, and they still did them after I left. My my the thing that killed me was I wanted a buyout. I really did, but I never qualified because I was either too young by a year or I didn't have enough service by a year. So by the time 2017 comes along in September, and I know it's just inevitable, so I'm I'm I'm that day I'm going to for a job interview at CNBC that day because I'm looking for work and I'm talking to different publications, and you know it happens, and it it was shocking, but I also was relieved because you can't stay at the same place all these years and grow. You gotta adapt, you gotta move on, you gotta do things that challenge you. And um, I ended up going to Jow Jones, and I I went from like mainstream reporting to financial reporting, so I could so in a sense reinvented myself until I got until that kind of became tedious. There was uh I mentioned to use kind of in the prep, but in 2017, when I was I got a bunch of job offers after I left USA Today. So and I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. One of the jobs that I turned down was from India. So Nvidia tried to get me to start there, that was right before they really took off. In 2018, they had kind of a dip, but after that they were soaring. But I just couldn't, I just couldn't bring myself to work internally. So I ended up going to Dow Jones and it was kind of a reinvention. And now, and I was there for like six and a half years, and then Tech Strong, which is a totally it's journalism, but it's also market research and and now uh analysts and a lot of research papers. It's it I think what's happening, and I I run into this a lot. It shows is I run into these really young, smart reporters, and I ask them, Well, where do you work? Oh, I work at uh Puck, I work at Semaphore, or I work at some place I've never heard of. And I'm like, oh, so you are heavy duty, deep in the weeds reporting, like Byron and I used to do in cybersecurity, which was frowned upon by the way, at the at USA Today. I'll be very honest.
Dave Reddy:Well, that is yeah, that is coming back at some in some places, and that's you know, so that so do you do you see do you see are you happy about that? I mean, do you see a future in that? I I do.
Jon Swartz:I'm very encouraged by that because I see these people doing the really really good work and it's highly specialized. And I think some of the people I work with here at uh TechStrong slash futurum are are doing things, do it, writing about topics they really understand, like at the CTO level. And it makes everybody smarter. It also they they also like the idea of talking to generalists, which I consider myself. You know, the thing at USA Today, and uh, you know, again, I love working there, I love the people there. It was a great ride, it was a great experience. I got to see so many different places and meet so many interesting people. But near the end, when we were doing the cybersecurity stuff, when I thought they would be happy that we did the book, they were afraid we were gonna get sued or we were gonna embarrass them with the book. So that to me was like that that sent such a negative message to me. And also they they basically said we can't justify two reporters covering this beat as you know as important as it was. So you're gonna have to cover social media from now on. Oh like Facebook. I was like, oh and it just to me just it epitomized the stupidity of just broad uh mainstream journalism in particular, and in in in general, I guess, and it USA today, and it's in the the layoffs continue. And I just I just went to a retirement party for three more people who took buyouts. I mean, they've gutted that place. It's just it's like a you know, the the the only way they can break even or make a profit is just just cut as much expenses as as uh the revenue that the paltry revenue they bring in.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, it's a sad it's pathetic. It's pathetic. One of the saddest stories in journalism, and that's saying something.
Jon Swartz:You know, and my friends who still are there are just heartbroken, and I I totally understand where they're coming from, but you know what? There are alternatives out here, and if you're lucky enough in this job market to find a place, there are so many interesting things that are going on, and with AI, you can write about anything. Yep.
Dave Reddy:So to that end, you went to Dow Jones for a while. I want to skip ahead to where you are now, which is Techstrong. Tell me about TechStrong, what's its mission? It's it's you know, it's a it's it's new media of a cent of a sort.
Jon Swartz:Yeah, they do a lot of video, they do a lot of video. So they we write about we have a lot of categories. Write about security quite a bit. That's like the bread and butter here. DevOps is a big big deal here. IT or platform engineering is is to a lesser extent. AI, they're they're kind of bequeathed to me this idea of writing about AI in different different ways. It's just a lot of content, there's a lot of contributed material. But in fact, I think Byron contributes here. There's a lot of guys who's James McGuire, I think, who was the editor-in-chief of eWeek.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, eWe, he's got tech strong of his own uh yeah. Yeah, so he I worked with him. He's also got uh tech voices, yeah.
Jon Swartz:Yeah, he's good. I I I really admire him. He's a really good writer. We have like uh Tom Smith, we have a bunch of people whose bylines I remember. Corey Johnson was here for a while from CNBC Bloomberg days. I just ran into him at the event in Las Vegas. There were a lot of interesting folks. So we do a lot of video, tons of video, lots of one-on-one interviews. We do a show five days a week called Tech Strong Gang. It's basically like uh think of pardon the interruption in Meet the Press, where we talk about three main topics and we kind of argue, not argue, but we we debate or give our interpretation of what we think is going on. And it's highly opinionated and highly politic political in terms of uh addressing what's going on in the tech industry and its relationship with the government. Well, let's see, what else? We do a lot of uh kind of events. So my colleagues in Europe, one of my colleagues is in Europe going to different events and doing a ton tons of interviews. Uh, we're part of we merged with the Futurum group, which is Daniel Newman's company. Daniel Newman is always on television. He's on CNPC every day, it seems. He does like three or four media hits a day. Uh, he was here too. I saw him last night. So we're kind of working with them. They did, they provide research and then we're on the journalism side. So there's kind of like two sides. It's an interesting dynamic. It's to me, it's I was telling somebody last night, a coworker of mine, that I learned so much more here because I'm around people who understand the topic infinitely better than any journalism outfit I ever worked in. And I mean, these are these are folks that are not journalists, they're they're experts in the industry. They built companies and they understand how things work and they are highly respected by the people that they interview. And then I'm kind of in the mix with them. And so it's a cross-polinization of different types of experiences. There are a couple of us who are reporters, but then for the most part, these are like technologists who build companies and who are highly they are they are highly opinionated, but they're informed opinionated. That's that's the one thing that I I find refreshing versus you know, I used to be on a show on NBC, which I really liked called Press Here. Press Here, sure. We did that for like a decade. Mike uh Mike and I were on it together a few times. I used to I used to go on it all the time. Joe Men was on it, Brad Stone at one point was on it. Yeah, there was like a Sarah Lacey was always on it, she was fantastic on that show. We did we did these all the time, but it was like a very constrained format. I mean, it was only for 22 minutes. There were three segments, each like seven minutes. And it's really there's only so much you can say or how deep you can go because of the format. I mean, the people there are extremely smart, but I think in this like longer conversation with folks who are experts in their field, they go down rabbit holes, no doubt, but you learn a hell of a lot more than say watching a kind of a a uh conventional TV show.
Dave Reddy:You you you are not focused on AI, but to your point, with AI, there's there's so much you can write about. And and a lot of your your headlines, and I'm looking at some just the last 24 hours, you've written three stories that have AI. It's about Oracle. Yeah, there's Oracle, Amazon, and Salesforce. So talk to me about AI. Uh it it's every I I ask this question every month, and every month I get a different answer because every month it's different.
Jon Swartz:So whatever you want it to be. It's like it's like the ultimate uh how do you pronounce that? It's like the the Rothschest test. I can't pronounce that word. You know, it's like the the the the butter. What does this image represent to you? It's a butterfly. No, it's a it's a it's a flying car. Yeah, no, it to me it's it's something that's been around for decades. It goes through different iterations, it's it means whatever you want it to mean. It to unfortunately, uh, for some people, it just means even greater profits at the expense of humans being employed. You saw Amazon's, I think Amazon's gonna get rid of 15% of their HR department, and it's directly tied to AI-driven productivity and restructuring. Salesforce laid off 4,000 people in customer service out of 9,000, and they're being replaced by agents. So I was talking to Will Iam about this, and he said, you know, I of all people, he was at the Dream Dream Force. I just talked with him, and he said, you know, it's technology is awesome, totally awesome, what it can do. But the problem is if you apply a social media business model to a gentic, that's gonna lead, that's no bueno, as I as he put it. It's gonna lead to all sorts of horrible things unless there's some sort of unless you regulate the your use of it. And to me, it it I think of the I think of like the car industry and how it wasn't regulated until there was a Ralph Nader. I think of how these things like social media was completely out of control and the damage it did to people, you know, unfettered uh when it wasn't, it wasn't any under any auspices. And I think AI can do so many great things. And I think it will overwhelmingly do, it'll make our lives easier, we'll live probably longer, we'll be more productive, we'll we'll discover things, we won't waste as much time on these tedious tasks. The flip side, of course, is you know, if it becomes so efficient, yeah, does it eliminate the need for humans? And I I that that terrifies me. And and I I see these companies from the board down, it's like a top-down mandate. In you know, integrate AI as fast as you possibly can. If there's a catastrophic cybersecurity issue, we'll we'll address it later. Or there's gonna be a bubble. Yeah, we'll we're we're not we're not affected by that. That's that's company B and company C. We're we're gonna be fine. I just think that there's so much money involved, and so everyone is pursuing the same goal that there is gonna be an AI bubble bloodbath. Yeah, I do worry about that. It's inevitable. You know, it's gonna happen. And there's also gonna be some catastrophic data breaches, I believe, that are inevitable because the security is lacking, it's laggard, it's far behind. It's not it's not a top consideration, really. And I I always feel feel badly about people who don't have access to technology or who feel they they will be displaced. I uh I think in journalism it's gonna be fairly pronounced impact, not for the best reasons. I mean, you're already starting to see this in terms of AI use. I mean, it's just gonna replace a bunch of it's like the wire store wire service. Man, I could see that can be completely replaced by AI. Sure. Sports storage sports coverage. Yeah, yeah. I think AP does use in limited cases, they do identify their use of it, but it's gonna be used in financial uh reporting, like for quarterly results. I already is being used, it's being developed everywhere internally. Most most public cases. I ask, I use Claude and I ask Claude to help me uh in terms of research. I don't always trust Claude because sometimes the facts are a little murky, but I will use it as a backup because there's, I mean, as a reporter, sometimes there's so much happening. You're like, okay, there were three instances of something involving layoffs. Like, what were the but I don't remember, like I before I had to go on Google to figure out am I missing something in this story? So I would say, hey Claude, there were like three major instances of layoffs recently. Can you recount them for me? Because I honestly will forget maybe miss one of them, and it'll point it out, and then I will take a look, and then I will write, overwrite. I I'll try to put it the story in my own voice, but I use it as a as an assistant, just as a backstop. And I will ask it to edit something just for inconsistencies in grammar, and it'll make suggestions. Sometimes, sometimes it will try to change the lead, which I find really like it will it will strip out anything that sounds original or pithy and replace it with something that's very generic. And I it does this all the time. And apparently it likes to add m-dashes. That's the oh yeah. So there are three, all right. So there are tons of m-dashes, lots of subheads, and the last paragraph of an AI story will be a summarization of what has already been written. And it will bury the lead almost all the time. It will do everything in sequence. I noticed that. And if you if you don't specifically, if you're not specific in what you want, it will go off on these weird tangents. Like Claude once I asked it about a court case, and it created a fictionalized version of this the case with a character that does not exist. And I asked it, why did you insert this person's name? Why did you and it didn't reply to me? I mean, it just it didn't respond. And I I saw I wasn't passing judgment. I was like, How did you come to this idea? And it just it never explained it. It just it ghosted me. Does Claude have feelings? May I may have hurt Claude's feelings, and then I said, I I I I apologize. I said, I I I should have been more specific on what I was asking. I just wanted a clear idea of uh some background about this this court case because I don't know anything about it, and then it gave me a straight straight answer. So it may have been the onus may have been on me, actually.
Dave Reddy:I think you may I think you may have actually uh upset it. And going back to 2001, a space odyssey, we know that artificial intelligence, it's not a good idea. Yeah, I try to be polite, I always try to be polite to the the chat bots. So a couple of fun questions to finish. So how many weeks are you on the road? You and I actually earlier this year on the plane, I think. Going to yeah, go both on a flight to Vegas, going to different tech shows.
Jon Swartz:So that was crazy, I know.
Dave Reddy:Well, how many weeks a year are you on the road and how often are you in Vegas?
Jon Swartz:So I go to Vegas on on average like five or six times a year now. I go to New York not that often, but I do go there. There have been places I've got, I mean, they I've gone to San Diego, Seattle, where was the others? Usually it's the same cities, but multiple times. There was one week that was crazy, one week where there were shows the same week, there were shows in Nashville, Napa, and Boston. I went to Napa because it was the easiest to get to. Plus, it was, you know, it's just nice. There's it's like New Orleans is coming up. There are shows in Europe all the time now. That's that's now a a several over there right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's there was just one in Barcelona. I think it was uh Atlassian had one in Barcelona. There's one in Amsterdam this week, there's one in Paris over the weekend. I I almost went to that one, but that one kind of fell through. There were there are let's see, they tend to be the same.
Dave Reddy:Right now, the the the the local version. Uh network X is in Network X is in Paris. I am at the Open Compute Project in San Jose. I mean it's it's uh dream for the first time.
Jon Swartz:Well today we today we had the show uh uh Tech Strong Gang, which is we do it early in the morning, and so there were there were there was me and Mitch. We're in Vegas, Alan was in Houston, Mike was in Amsterdam, and then we had our cybersecurity reporter in New York. Wow, everybody travel is back. Oh god, I know. I mean, I I am uh you know, I'm kind of just getting my last burst of travel. I think you know what happens is it this goes on between August and Thanksgiving. That's that's that's trade show season, the fall push. Yes, and then it then it tapers off dramatically.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, then everybody decides to go uh relax over eggnog for and turkey for a few weeks. My last question is always the same, it although it's different parts. So I'm gonna ask you so San Jose, Georgia, or your second home, Las Vegas. Oh, so what so what was the question? I'm sorry.
Jon Swartz:What where would you rather be? San Jose? Oh, oh, oh, well, I moved to so I Las Vegas never. More than no more than 48 hours. That's my rule. 48 hours in Vegas, and that's it. Then I'm out.
Dave Reddy:So now we know what's like.
Jon Swartz:So it's top of mind. And I have a I have like allergies, so Vegas wreaks havoc with my with my but I uh Bay Area. I mean, I'm from the Bay Area, I grew up there. I moved away, I went to school in Georgia, and I lived in lived in London. But yeah, I mean, I like Athens, but Athens is kind of in another world, it's so far away. But San Jose, I mean it was like family and friends all live there. That's what I grew up with. I like the weather, I like everything about it, everything's close to it. I love the way people think there. You know, there's just it's a it's an appealing place to me. Yeah, no, I no, no, no ill will towards Las Vegas. It's just like I I think I've had my fill of it this this year, last year too. Fair enough. A lot of shows in Florida, by the way. Oh, yes, I've I've been to a few in my own time. Yeah, oh god, yeah. I I used to go to Florida a lot. Yeah, that's just a long trip, though.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's way down south. At any rate, John, this was great. Thank you so much. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Lots of fun, lots of fun stories, thank you.
Jon Swartz:Here, my you bet.
Dave Reddy:I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again a big thank you to John Swartz of TechStrong Group. Please don't forget to join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we identified the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready at bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E Double D Y at Big Valley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters at bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening, and as always, think big.
