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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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 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. -
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. -
As the Hollywood strikes grind on, some background TV and film actors are concerned about losing jobs to artificial intelligence.
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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.
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Meta's new app Threads aims to be a friendlier alternative to Twitter by deemphasizing news and politics. But for many people, partisan brawls are a big part of Twitter's appeal.
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Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Meta's Twitter clone as a more "friendly" place for online discourse. Executives say breaking news and politics will not be the emphasized. But is that realistic? -
Facebook parent company Meta broke most-downloaded records recently with its new app, Threads. It's a direct challenge to Twitter, which has been upended under the leadership of Elon Musk.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter owner Elon Musk have long had a rivalry. That's now been put on vivid display with Zuckerberg taking aim at Twitter by launching the new social media app Threads.
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Meta hopes to become the go-to platform for public discourse. Its app comes as Elon Musk's chaotic rule at Twitter has many looking for a new place to go.
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the social media platform is capping the number of tweets users can view — saying the unusual measure was needed to fight off companies that scrape Twitter for data.
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The rise of artificial intelligence has Hollywood actors on edge. Studios are interested in how the technology can allow for digital clones of actors - and actors are pushing back.
