WSJ.com revamps tech page as competitor ReCode launches
The Wall Street Journal is shown on sale at Hudson News in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.(Photo: Stan Honda, AFP/Getty Images)
Story Highlights
- Dubbed WSJD, the site will contain tech stories from WSJ bureaus worldwide
- Replaces AllthingsD.com, which is now defunct
- AllthingsD.com founders launch competitor site, Recode.net
Two veteran journalists who previously worked for The Wall Street Journallaunched a new technology news site Thursday, triggering the newspaper to revamp its technology page on WSJ.com.
The new site, ReCode.net, is run by Revere Digital, a media startup founded by Kara Swisher, a former WSJ reporter, and Walt Mossberg, the WSJ's chief technology device reviewer until he left the paper recently.
"Why have we chosen Re/code as the name for our new creation? Simply put: Because everything in tech and media is constantly being refreshed, renewed and reimagined. And this is the reinvention of ourselves," wrote Swisher and Mossberg on their new site.
The WSJ's newly designed page, dubbed "WSJD," expands coverage of the popular topic and replaces AllThingsD.com, another company-owned tech news site that was founded and run by Mossberg and Swisher but shut down at the end of 2013.
WSJD features breaking news, enterprise stories and video that are created by staffers from Silicon Valley and other WSJ bureaus worldwide. Many of its stories are available only to paid subscribers.
Dow Jones, a News Corp. subsidiary that owns The Wall Street Journal, unveiled its plans to upgrade technology coverage after it failed to agree on a new contract last year with Mossberg and Swisher to continue operating AllThingsD.com. The contract expired at the end of 2013. The newspaper said then that it planned to hire 20 reporters, editors, bloggers and visual journalists for the new site.
As of Wednesday, online traffic to AllThingsD.com, which was free and widely read in Silicon Valley, was steered to WSJ.com's revamped page. Dow Jones says it also owns WSJD.com, but the site was blank as of Thursday morning. The company still owns the AllThingsD brand but says it hasn't determined its plans for it.
As they sought to create ReCode, Mossberg and Swisher recruited AllThingsD's staff to join the startup. As part of its partnership with NBCUniversal, ReCode's content will appear on NBC, CNBC and MSNBC.
The competing ventures plan to diversify revenue sources by hosting technology conferences. The Wall Street Journal's first WSJD-branded conference will be held in October 2014 in Laguna Beach, California.
ReCode said its first conference -- called "The Code Conference" -- will be held in May 2014 in Rancho Palos Verdes in California.
AllThingsD was launched in 2007 as an extension of The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference that debuted four years earlier.