Wolff: Tech journalist Kara Swisher is a feared player

• Journalist Kara Swisher is a major force in the world of tech
• She is so aggressive that many are afraid to challenge her
• Even Rupert Murdoch once called her %27crazy scary%27

In every journalism generation, there are various re-enactments of the 1957 movie Sweet Smell of Success, in which Burt Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, the powerful and vindictive Broadway gossip columnist whose self-interest shapes everything he writes.

A version of that role is presently being played by Kara Swisher, a proudly charmless and abrasive figure in San Francisco. On Aug. 28, Swisher helped break the news of Google founder Sergey Brin's affair with a Google employee and his split from his wife, Anne Wojcicki, who is friends with Swisher and her spouse, Megan Smith, a high-ranking Google executive.

Swisher is not, per se, a gossip columnist but part of the technology press, with its fragile line between promotion and coverage and its protection racket method of sucking up to sponsors and allies and ignoring or dinging those who do not fall into line.

With The Wall Street Journal's influential gadget columnist, Walt Mossberg, Swisher runs the Journal-owned business conference, D, where media and tech CEOs vie for attention and speaking spots. And she runs the website All Things D, also owned by the Journal and its parent, News Corp. All Things D (that is, digital) began as an adjunct to the conference but has since morphed into a dominant tech news site — and, as well, a personal fiefdom and power base for Swisher.

Swisher and Mossberg have used their clout in the industry to become the kind of individual voices that can provide the new revenue streams that mainstream media companies say they want to encourage. Except that now the team, which has long been at odds with News Corp., is trying to use its independent power base and free agent status to find new backers to help them create a business to compete with the D brands. (While Mossberg is a Journal staff member, Swisher, is not; she has a contract that expires at the end of the year.)

In a further extension of technology business conflicts, and of how lines cross when journalists become journalism entrepreneurs, Swisher and Mossberg are now seeking financial backing from companies that they otherwise cover as news subjects.

It's a stew of mixed-up allegiances. Indeed, Swisher has skillfully made these conflicts part of her professional persona.

The inherent conflict of interest of a journalist covering a business — particularly a journalist who has major influence on it — being married to someone with such a great financial stake in and career agenda at the company, are obvious. So obvious, that Swisher has made copious disclosures about it. These disclosures, in which she says she herself has no personal financial interest in Smith's Google fortune (although Smith and Swisher have children together), have the curious effect of reminding everybody what an insider she is and what a power couple she is a part of.

In an e-mail response about this column, Swisher chose to emphasize the importance of her disclosures, as though disclosing conflicts resolves them.

The disclosures are so detailed and aggressive that, Swisher implies, if you still question her objectivity, you might be really questioning her sexual orientation, which will "simply not be tolerated," she adds in her official "ethics statement." Indeed, she mixes her financial disclosure with disclosures about her opposition to California's Proposition 8. Her same-sex marriage becomes, somehow, proof of her righteousness.

Swisher is both so famously thin-skinned and so notoriously combative that she's created a let's-not-go-there force field around herself. Nobody wants to challenge her for fear of her backlash.

When Rupert Murdoch first met Swisher after he had purchased The Wall Street Journal, he returned from California telling people he found her "crazy scary."

Hers is a new kind of journalism career — or, in the J.J. Hunsecker model, an old one from the days before conflicts had to be identified — made on the basis of her ever-shifting and complex alliances and her own political power, as well as her ability to rough you up if you oppose her.

Before the growth of the D brands, Swisher wrote a column called "Boomtown" for the Journal, where she was then a staff member. It became something of a parody of dot-com fawning and excess. Post-crash, she was eased out of that perch. Swisher, who has been closely aligned with executives at AOL, also wrote two books about that company. One extolled the genius of its rise; the other rationalized its fall.

Teaming with Mossberg rescued her from dubious punditry and allowed her to regain a journalism position in the new, less rigorous and more forgiving world of instant coverage. Her critics have long tracked the favorable notice of her friends in All Things D and the sour coverage of her rivals and those of her partner, including the recent dive into the Google soap opera. (This approach is hardly restricted to her site and is, in general, the M.O. of much technology-trade journalism.)

Swisher and Mossberg have themselves become adept at playing the technology press, and are the obvious sources in a Fortune article in late August reporting that they have hired bankers to help them sell All Things D — even though News Corp. says it is not for sale — and suggesting that Bloomberg is an interested buyer, which Bloomberg sources deny.

The team reportedly has an offer from Comcast to start its own venture to compete with D (which will involve appearances on Comcast-owned CNBC) and are rumored to be in discussions with The Washington Post and its new owner, Jeff Bezos.

In July, Nate Silver, The New York Times data-cruncher who built a personal following during the presidential race and became an example of the journalist as brand-name hero and independent power, announced he had cut a new and better deal with Disney and its television networks ESPN and ABC and was leaving the Times. Swisher and Mossberg have also approached Disney, which declined to back them.

It's a new business with rougher players and rules that are as flexible as you can make them. We should perhaps be careful what we wish for.