Judges

Kara Swisher

Host and co-host, New York magazine
National Judge

Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast "On With Kara Swisher," and co-host of the podcast "Pivot," both with New York Media. She is the co-founder of Recode and executive producer of the Code Conference. Swisher became a Livingston Awards judge in 2014.

Previously, Swisher co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital,” with Walt Mossberg. It was the major high-tech conference with interviewees such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other leading players in the tech and media industries. The gathering was considered one of the leading conferences focused on the convergence of tech and media industries. She and Mossberg were also the co-executive editors of the tech and media website, AllThingsD.com from 2007 until 2013.

Swisher worked in the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal, where she wrote the column, “BoomTown,” which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and also on The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. Previously, Swisher covered breaking news about the web’s major players and Internet policy issues and wrote feature articles on technology for the paper.

Swisher was a reporter at The Washington Post and an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C. She is the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”

Swisher received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her graduate degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.