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.
-
The U.S. operation of video-sharing app TikTok is on the market. President Trump says the company that owns the app has to sell it by next month or he will ban it over national security concerns.
-
The president's announcement comes as Microsoft is in talks to acquire the app, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company.
-
In the first criminal charges connected to the Twitter hack earlier this month, state and federal authorities reveal new details about how the scheme allegedly occurred.
-
Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., says Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple operate like monopolies and need to be broken up or regulated.
-
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer attacked the social media network on the same day Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress. Mayer also committed to making TikTok's algorithm public.
-
The CEOs tell Congress that the giant American tech companies do not stifle competition, saying the concern that too much power is concentrated in too few companies is unfounded.
-
The heads of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple will face lawmakers' questions about whether they are using their power to squash competition.
-
The White House is considering a number of economic sanctions to cut off the hugely popular Chinese-owned app from U.S. users over national security concerns.
-
Lawmakers and government agencies say the attack exposes vulnerabilities in the social network's systems that could be exploited to spread disinformation.
-
Twitter confirms to NPR that it is investigating the coordinated hack, which attacked the accounts of some of the richest and most popular names on Twitter and may have reaped more than $100,000.
-
In a major victory for the tech giant, the European Union's second-highest court said the tax break received by Apple did not represent an unfair advantage.
-
Cameo has become one of the fastest-growing tech startups by letting anyone pay for birthday wishes and other greetings recorded by celebrities and influencers. But will its Silicon Valley hype last?