[chralieboy]

Note that Kara Swisher (executive editor of Re/Code) was married to Megan Smith [1]. Megan is now CTO of the United States, but previously was at Google for over a decade and a VP at Google X.

It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension her team, would therefore have made a number of high-level contacts inside Google.

That said, if they are speaking to sources then they should reference them (even if anonymously.) Otherwise, as you noted, we can only consider it an opinion piece masquerading as journalism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith

[steve-howard]

Kara's ethics statement claims that she has no non-public information related to Megan's job:

http://recode.net/ajax/writerinfo/ethics/kara-swisher/

[PhantomGremlin]

Kara's ethics statement claims that she has no non-public information related to Megan's job

I see nothing in that ethics statement that contradicts the GP's assertion which was:

   It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension
   her team, would therefore have made a number of
   high-level contacts inside Google