It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of The Wall Street Journal and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970. That's not a typo.
So it seems fitting to me that I'll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I'll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.
I didn't make this decision lightly, or hastily, or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my
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Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State
And, in the best professional decision of my life, I converted myself into a tech columnist in 1991. As a result, I got to bear witness to a historic parade of exciting, revolutionary innovation — from slow, clumsy ancient PCs to sleek, speedy smartphones; from CompuServe and early AOL to the mobile web, apps, and social media.
My column has run weekly in a variety of places over the years, most recently on The Verge and Recode under the Vox Media umbrella, where I've been quite happy and have added a podcast of which I'm proud.
So I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.
I will likely write a bit more about this before I stop. But, for now, I just want to thank you for reading, viewing and listening to me over the years, and for letting me know when you thought me right or crazy.
I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, The Wall Street Journal and CNBC for giving me a voice. And, to name just a few individuals, I want to thank some indispensable career partners along the way: Kara Swisher, Norm Pearlstine, Paul Steiger, Larry O'Donnell, Jim Bankoff, Nilay Patel, Lia Lorenzano-Kennett, Stephanie Capparell, and Katie Boehret.
I'm not going anywhere for a while, so you'll still be seeing my columns, TV appearances, and podcasts this month and next. I will enjoy creating every one of them, just as I enjoyed writing those stories from Detroit in 1970.
—By Walt Mossberg, Recode.net.
CNBC's parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Recode's parent Vox, and the companies have a content-sharing arrangement.