I Covered Tech for the Times for 28 Years, And Now My Time Is Over
On December 1,the New York Times was missing something: its star tech reporter. John Markoff had taken his buyout and was officially retired. It’s a loss not just for the newspaper, but for all of us. For years, Markoff had delivered one epochal scoop after another for the Times*: the first significant computer virus, the emergence of the web browser, the rise of artificial intelligence, the menace of the dark-side hacker, the problems with the Clipper Chip…over 2,000 bylines, each one thoroughly reported, crisply rendered, and gloriously drenched with quiet authority.I first met Markoff when he was working for InfoWorld. It was 1982 and I was beginning to write about tech for* Rolling Stone*. Everyone told me I had to get together with this guy who really understood the whole picture — the tech, the culture, the changes, and why the digital revolution was like the sixties. When I did meet Markoff, I found a kindred spirit and a trusty guide to a subject on which I would feast for the next three decades. I also found a friend—and he was the best technology reporter ever.Thankfully, he won’t stop writing. I’ve heard that the* Times will be keeping him on contract for more stories; he will also be a writer in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California at Berkeley next year, and is writing a biography of Stewart Brand. And maybe we’ll get him to do a story here and there for Backchannel.Last weekend the Times feted its star tech reporter with a farewell event at the UC Berkeley Journalism School. Markoff’s remarks, slightly edited, appear below. As usual, he’s delivered the goods. — Steven Levy
A NYT tradition: when one of their human institutions leaves, staffers mock up a parody edition of the paper.
Yes, I’m retiring from the New York Times. This is obviously bittersweet, but it’s also very weird. Whenever I tell someone I’m leaving the paper they immediately say “congratulations.”
What the hell? Congratulate me for bailing on one of the best jobs in the world?
The simple fact is that I lasted longer than a lot of my friends. But until I changed my mind last summer and took the buyout, I was sure I was going to go out like those guys at the Examiner — the copy editors who worked at night in their t-shirts. And then keeled over on their CRTs and were taken out feet first.
But what the heck.
It’s really difficult to be leaving now. I just watched my chosen profession deliver the goods on the guy who is about to become president. And then have at least some of the American people say, “Rope. Noose. Journalist.”
So on second thought, maybe it’s a good time to be stepping away. During my time as a reporter I’ve seen a cascade of changes. Maybe I should have seen it coming. I got into the business as a paper boy. Two of the houses on my route would later be the homes of Steve Jobs and Larry Page. That’s both ironic and odd. I delivered papers to the eventual homes of two people who have done more than anyone in world to change the way the news is delivered.
The first transition happened when I was in college. Working for the weekly student paper, I would take our latest edition to the local newspaper — the Walla Walla Union Bulletin — every week and watch the linotype operators and hot lead typesetters. They were cigar-smoking guys wearing rough aprons.
Then when I went back to school one fall, the men were all gone. It was the fall of 1969 and the Union Bulletin had gone to offset type. The men in the aprons had vanished. They had been shipped off with the press to a small paper in Oregon. In their place were women in skirts working at Selectric keyboards.
The next transition happened 15 years later when I got my first job at a daily paper, the San Francisco Examiner. I was part of a new generation of reporters who went to the gym after work instead of the bar.
Will Hearst was trying to save the Examiner. “The Monarch of the Dailies” was trapped in the afternoon and struggling. It would continue to suffer — but it was a great place to be a reporter. Warren Hinckle wandered the newsroom followed by a dog with various body parts dragging along the floor. Hunter Thompson would fax his copy in. Mostly he wouldn’t make his deadlines and a guy named Macumber would write the stories for him and nobody seemed to notice.
I guess what’s most interesting to me is that I have failed to make the last transition, which has a lot to do with why I’m leaving now.
That’s another irony — that I was one of the first to write about the digital world, but when it really arrived it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be a digital native.
When blogging began, John Dvorak told me that there was no point in doing it unless you posted at least seven times a day. “Why would I want to do that?” I thought. I had already worked for an afternoon daily and I never wanted to work for a wire service.
Yet another irony. The one thing I will probably be remembered for is saying that I believed that blogging would be “the CB radio of the 21st century.”
More recently I watched the Times’ “Snow Fall” experiment, followed by Facebook Live, with a growing awareness that I began as a print reporter and I will go away that way.
I used to tell people that the Times’ loyal readership was both its great strength and weakness. The good news was that they would read the paper until they died. The bad news was that they were dying.
But maybe that’s not entirely certain. Isn’t it wonderfully ironic that after dozens of experiments with video and smartphone apps and clickbait and native advertising, what has caused new subscriptions to skyrocket 10 times since the election is what the Times has always been committed to — all the news that’s fit to print without fear or favor?
Some things won’t change. I’m certain that when the next corrupt president is impeached it will be because of the hard work and persistence of some new Woodward and Bernstein.
Most of you know that before I became a reporter I was a political activist. I was part of a generation that was radicalized by the war in Vietnam. At some point in the late 1970s I realized that I’d missed the memo and the movement I thought I was part of was no longer.
No longer being a True Believer was good training for being a reporter. Fake news will come and go, but an independent press will always be the bedrock of a democracy.
I want to end by reading something Bertolt Brecht wrote that I stumbled across in my twenties:
I still believe that. Thanks.
