
Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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Some 200,000 tech jobs have been lost in what is seen as one of the sharpest downturns in the tech industry's history. Here is what you need to know about the mass layoffs in Silicon Valley.
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The Justice Department and eight states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, saying the company has worked to squash rival technologies and choke off competitors.
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The sci-fi thriller M3gan about a doll that turns deadly has reignited conversations about the potential perils of AI — from ChatGPT to avatar creators to bots being developed to argue court cases.
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Microsoft is cutting 10,000 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce. It says a looming recession has forced customers to cut back on spending.
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Microsoft has announced it will cut 10,000 jobs in coming months, with lay off notices going out Wednesday. Like many other tech and finance companies, it's bracing for a recession this year.
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The power of AI has been on full display on social media, with ChatGPT and Lensa going viral. As AI becomes more mainstream, concerns about misinformation, privacy and bias are becoming louder.
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"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" Musk tweeted after most respondents to his Twitter poll said he should step down.
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Press freedom advocates are criticizing Elon Musk after he suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover him, and his chaotic leadership of the social media site.
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The European Union's top tech regulator has overseen the passage of sweeping privacy and competition regulations, and has spearheaded more than half a dozen legal cases against Big Tech.
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk is taking issue with the App Store's fees. But if Musk follows through with his plan to welcome back banned Twitter users, Apple could simply remove Twitter from the App Store.
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As the European Union's top tech regulator, Vestager has overseen the passage of sweeping privacy and competition regulations. She has spearheaded more than half a dozen legal cases against Big Tech.
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Prosecutors have asked a judge to sentence Elizabeth Holmes to 15 years in prison for the crimes she committed as the head of Theranos, which promised to revolutionize medicine but was a fraud.