Critical Mass.(Walter S. Mossberg's successful career in gadget evaluation)

On a blustery, overcast day early this year, P.R. representatives from Sprint and Samsung stopped by the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal to meet with the columnist Walter S. Mossberg. The agenda was clear: Sprint had a new music phone designed by Samsung, and the group was hoping for a positive reception from a man who has become to technology what Brooks Atkinson once was to the New York theatre--someone whose judgment can ratify years of effort or sink the show. Mossberg's "Personal Technology" column, which anchors the front of the Journal's Thursday Marketplace section, is particularly powerful when it comes to judging innovation intended for the consumer market. The opening sentence of his inaugural column, sixteen years ago, was "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it's not your fault," a sentence that Mossberg has since described as his "mission statement."

Mossberg's influence was felt almost at once. In 1992, he began championing the Internet service provider America Online for its simplicity, calling it far superior to its competitors, CompuServe and Prodigy; his persistent criticism of Prodigy probably hastened its demise. (Steve Case, AOL's former chairman and C.E.O., says that Mossberg's column "helped move us from the status of just another wannabe to a potential contender.") In 1996, after Mossberg called the handheld Palm Pilot a "breakthrough product"--a comment that Donna Dubinsky, the company's former C.E.O., calls "a huge thing"--its sales surged. In February, Mossberg praised the site blip.tv for the quality of its Web-based TV shows; according to Dina Kaplan, the company's co-founder, the Web site had a thirty-five-per-cent jump in viewers in the first twenty-four hours after the column appeared.

Reviews of digital products and advances have become commonplace. The magazine PC, among others, has reviewed products since the eighties, and Wired covers technology with the avidity that the Washington Post brings to politics. David Pogue has been the Times' technology critic since 2000; Newsweek, Business Week, and Fortune all have regular technology critics. But the digital world inevitably democratizes information. A Web site, for instance, may be devoted to a single product. On January 9th, when, at the annual MacWorld conference, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, offered the first glimpse of Apple's forthcoming iPhone, a combination cell phone and music player, the blog Engadget.com had more traffic than the Times' Web site.

Few tech columnists, though, write as clearly about the subject as Mossberg. Nor is it likely that any print journalist in America is so richly compensated by his newspaper. Some journalists, such as Thomas L. Friedman, of the Times, earn more if one factors in speeches and books, but when, recently, Mossberg signed a four-year contract, two Journal sources told me, his annual compensation approached a million dollars. Mossberg refuses to discuss his pay; a friend with knowledge of the negotiations says that "pay has always been an issue at the Journal," and that Mossberg doesn't want to be viewed as a "prima donna."

A week after Eric Schmidt became the C.E.O. of Google, six years ago, he went to see Mossberg. "He had just written an article about Google," Schmidt says. "I wanted to get his insights. He was very gracious in saying, 'This is what works. This is what doesn't.' He's seen everything." Schmidt says of him, as one might of a wine writer, "He has a good nose."

I witnessed Mossberg's "nose" for new products in mid-February, when the representatives from Sprint and Samsung arrived to pitch the new music phone. Mossberg is not an especially daunting presence. He is sixty years old, bald and pudgy, and was wearing a purple open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The delegation included Sprint's communications manager for consumer devices, Michelle Leff Mermelstein; a product manager, Jason Cole; and Samsung's senior public-relations manager, Kim Titus. Mossberg knew Mermelstein better than the others (he considers her one of the best publicists he deals with). They went into an office that looked, at first glance, like a museum. A bookcase held computers from the dawn of the consumer-computing age: a Timex Sinclair 1000, an Atari 800, a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100, a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, and the first Palm Pilot, among others. Also on view were Boston Red Sox souvenirs, framed Mossberg columns, and a Kremlin press pass from Mossberg's days as a national-security correspondent.

"When we sat down and decided who are we going to show this to first, I said, ...