clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

John Paczkowski's Back With Daily "Code/red" Column on Re/code

New times deserves a new column.

Adam Tow

One of the joys of running a website is the ability to hire some of the best voices in the tech sector. And that’s exactly one of the very first things that Walt Mossberg and I did seven years ago when we asked John Paczkowski to join us as the first editorial employee of AllThingsD.com.

This was the actual conversation Walt and I had at the time:

Me: We need to hire a John Paczkowski type.

Walt: Then let’s hire John Paczkowski.

And one of the things that attracted us to John was his amazing column at the San Jose Mercury News at the time called “Good Morning Silicon Valley.” It was fresh, it was newsy, it was insightful and, most of all, it was very, very funny. With a combination of clever headlines and pointed remarks, he managed to keep the sometimes over-indulged denizens of tech honest, but without being petty or mean about it.

Thus, we introduce Code/red, the new five-day-a-week column from John that will be a mix of news, analysis, tidbits and much more. We hope you will like it as much as we do. As John writes in his first column: “New times deserve a new column, but the mission’s the same: To entertain and inform with a daily collection of short news items, scoops, comments and commentary aided and abetted by whoever’s reading.”

After moving him to an editor job at the newly reconfigured Re/code site in January, heading our special projects and the new operating agreement we have with NBC, we also wanted to make sure that the new site did not lose his distinctive voice.

Code/red has a lot of meanings that are not meant to define John’s effort — from the name of a 1990s British boy band to an unofficial Marine order upon which a Tom Cruise movie pivoted to a very serious hospital emergency warning.

But we have our own definition: Pay attention, because John has a lot to say and you’ll love how he says it.

You can subscribe to Code/red via daily email here or read his very first effort here on our website.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Vox Recommends

Get curated picks of the best Vox journalism to read, watch, and listen to every week, from our editors.