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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The bill, now advancing to the Senate, represents the most serious threat yet to the video app used by half of Americans. -
Many users are concealing their public photos and sharing instead in private spaces. It's something of a protest against the over-sharing culture of social media. And Gen Z is driving the trend. -
The company on Friday said it has started blocking California-based news outlets to protest a pending bill that supporters say would extend a lifeline to the ailing news industry. -
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes more than 90% of world's most advanced chips, also halted production, but it plans to resume chipmaking overnight. -
In an agreement released on Monday, Google said it will permanently remove information it secretly gathered when millions of people were searching the internet in "incognito" mode. -
Android users have long complained that texting someone with an iPhone on iMessage is an unpleasant experience. The Justice Department argues it is also an example of anti-competitive behavior. -
The billionaire sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate after the group published a series of reports detailing an uptick of hate speech on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. -
Reddit, the San Francisco social media site that describes itself as "the front page of the internet," is debuting as a public stock on Thursday. -
National security officials have long warned about the dangers TikTok poses as long as it is owned by a Chinese company, but the threat remains theoretical. -
The House voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve a bill that would force parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban of the social media app on U.S. devices. -
The nonprofit sued by Elon Musk's X says the legal tactic is an attempt to silence criticism of the company. The Center for Countering Digital Hate published reports documenting hate speech on X. -
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an internal memo that the AI tool's problematic images were unacceptable. He vowed to re-release a better version of the service in the coming weeks.
