Who does Kara Swisher work for?

The question in the title of this post is meant to be facetious — sort of. I know that Kara works for the Wall Street Journal, or at least for Dow Jones (and ultimately for Rupert Murdoch now). The only reason I ask is that she broke a story about Facebook on her Boomtown blog, which is located at All Things D, the site that she and WSJ gadget guru Walt Mossberg run. That story appears nowhere at the Journal site, as far as I can tell.

All Things D started as an online adjunct to the similarly named tech conference, which Swisher and Mossberg have put on since 2003, and which regularly features geekosphere luminaries such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a few other people you might have heard of. The website was recently relaunched as a news/blogging site with regular posts from Kara and John Paczkowski (and somewhat less frequent posts by Mossberg). The site is owned by Dow Jones but “run autonomously as a small online start-up,” according to the About page.

I guess what I’m driving at is that I think what All Things D is doing is an interesting experiment. Some of Kara’s video interviews show up at the Journal site, but her blog appears to only be at allthingsd.com — and the Facebook story is only there (at least for now), perhaps because it’s just a management shuffle at a non-public company, and therefore might not merit a full WSJ story.

In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens if Kara breaks more stories there rather than the WSJ site — it’s possible that the Journal won’t even care, since it apparently sells ads at All Things D as well.

Update:

Kara’s rather long disclosure statement (in which she also talks about the fact that her partner Megan Smith is the director of new business development at Google) notes that she is no longer on staff at the Journal but is employed as an independent contractor. I still think the model the Journal is experimenting with at All Things D is an interesting one.