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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For years, a secretive group has been purchasing land in Solano County, Calif., to create a utopian city for the tech elite. Locals are telling the techies to take their plan someplace else.
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When Hurricane Idalia slammed into the Florida coast, it decimated several small beach towns and fishing villages. Now, those communities are beginning the task of rebuilding. -
Hurricane Idalia's storm surge and powerful winds raked across several of Florida's older and rural Gulf Coast communities. Now, the cleanup begins.
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Idalia came ashore along the Florida Gulf Coast as a major hurricane — the first to hit the region since the 1800s. A major storm surge and electricity outages are complicating rescue efforts.
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Now tropical storm Idalia came ashore in the Big Ben region of Florida. The storm hammered low-lying areas and brought a massive storm surge. Power is out for scores of residents.
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Hundreds of people around the world lined up to have their eyeballs scanned by a tech startup that says it wants to authenticate humans in the age of AI.
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The news publisher and maker of ChatGPT have held tense negotiations over striking a licensing deal for the use of the paper's articles to train the chatbot. Now, legal action is being considered.
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The project is called Worldcoin. It was co-founded by Sam Altman of ChatGPT fame. Its mission is to authenticate all the world's humans, one eyeball scan at a time.
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Five background actors told NPR they had to undergo face and body digital scans while on TV and movie sets. The use of digital replicas is a sticking point in the ongoing strikes in Hollywood.
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Twitter has ditched the bird logo for an X. Elon Musk says the change is a step toward turning the platform into an app that offers other services. It's a tall order considering Twitter's finances.
