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.
-
A judge in San Francisco said Trump's order targeting the popular Chinese-owned app has a "modest" basis in national security and represents a free speech violation for U.S. users of the app. -
U.S. tech company Oracle is joining hands with Walmart to become a technology partner with TikTok, an arrangement that satisfies the White House's concerns over the security of American user data. -
The U.S. Commerce Department says people in the U.S. won't be able to download or update the popular video-sharing app TikTok or the messaging app WeChat, starting Sunday.
-
The Commerce Department says it will ban all U.S. business transactions with Chinese-owned apps WeChat and TikTok. The parent company ByteDance is under pressure to sell TikTok to a U.S. company.
-
As of Sunday, no mobile app store in the U.S. will be allowed to distribute or maintain the popular Chinese-owned apps, the Commerce Department says. -
Trump also said he's been advised "there is no legal path" for the U.S. to keep a cut of whatever TikTok deal the government approves, an idea he had earlier floated. -
In his new book No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings argues that in order for a creative workplace to succeed, it needs as few policies and rules as possible. Others say the culture is demoralizing.
-
Netflix added 26 million subscribers so far this year. Reed Hastings co-founder and CEO of the streaming service credits the company's unorthodox office culture for its meteoric rise.
-
Oracle says it's ready to be a "trusted technology provider" for the hit video-sharing app. A bid for TikTok's U.S. operations by tech giant Microsoft has been rejected. -
With its deadline to sell or be banned in the U.S. fast approaching, Chinese tech giant ByteDance said it will not sell TikTok to either Microsoft or Oracle. That's according to China state TV.
