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 working-class town of about 30,000 just outside of Pittsburgh was rattled after learning the gunman came from their community, but most are hoping to put the violent episode behind them. -
Bethel Park, Pa., is the hometown of Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate President Trump. In the wake of the shooting, residents there are shocked, but are recovering.
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A tech meltdown left workers at airlines, banks and hospitals staring at the dreaded “blue screen of death” as their computers went inert in what is being described as a historic outage. -
A global computer glitch apparently triggered by software distributed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread global outages late Thursday and into Friday morning.
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Vance, who has become a darling to the Silicon Valley elite, made inroads in tech and venture capital circles during a stint in San Francisco. Now, Vance is tapping that network to supercharge the Trump re-election bid. -
Sen. J.D. Vance formally accepts his party’s vice presidential nomination at the Republican convention Wednesday night. His close ties to tech billionaires might supercharge Trump's reelection bid.
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A new lawsuit filed by record labels Universal, Sony and Warner says their catalogs have been ripped off by two AI music generators. But there’s a twist: It’s not clear the courts are on their side.
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The European Union has charged Elon Musk’s X with violating new regulations for social media platforms. Musk faces hefty fines over delivering misinformation. -
A new lawsuit filed by record labels Universal, Sony and Warner says their catalogs have been ripped off by two AI music generators. But there’s a twist: It’s not clear the courts are on their side.
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Artificial intelligence tech companies are refusing to abide by internet protocol when it comes to scraping data. Their ravenous scavenging behavior is upending the basic rules of the internet.
