Add this to the short list of enduring Valley partnerships: Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. The veteran technology reviewer brought Swisher into the Wall Street Journal; the duo launched the business newspaper's powerful tech conference, All Things Digital; and they're jointly running the tech news site spun off from the conference. DC-based Mossberg and Swisher, who lives in San Francisco's Castro, don't share an office and a party plane, like the inseparable Google founders, but their relationship is equally tight, to judge by this week's New Yorker profile of Mossberg. After Swisher, a lesbian, announced she intended to marry Megan Smith, now a Google executive, it was her Journal colleague who confronted her resistant mother. Read on for the story.
When she and Megan Smith, a Google executive, decided to marry, Swisher told me, her mother "was troubled by the idea of a gay wedding." She and Smith have two children, and she recalls that when she came home with the first baby Mossberg was there, and so was her mother, who "really likes Walt a lot." Swisher went on, "We were having dinner and she was being difficult—she was arguing with me. I was getting really uncomfortable. Walt took her down like I've never seen anybody take anybody down: 'How dare you talk to her like this? This is an important issue and you have to be supportive no matter what as a parent.' My mother was just shocked—he was relentless in not letting her off the hook." [Ken Auletta interviewed the Journal's Kara Swisher, for a profile about her colleague, Walt Mossberg.]
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