Media News

Reuters investigative security reporter Menn leaving

January 27, 2022

Posted by Chris Roush

Joseph Menn

Joseph Menn, an investigative security and tech policy reporter at Reuters, is leaving the news wire after 10 years.

He has been based in San Francisco.

His Reuters work has included the exclusive that RSA took $10 million to promote a flawed random number generator that allowed the NSA to break into widely used security tools, and work showing that Russian propaganda accounts were critical early boosters of QAnon.

Menn previously covered tech security, digital media and privacy and the computer industry from the Financial Times’ San Francisco bureau. Before that, he spent a decade with the Los Angeles Times, covering similar topics. He also spent three years in Los Angeles covering the entertainment industry.

He has won several national and state awards for his journalism, including a Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His reporting and writing has been nominated twice for a Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious in business journalism.

He is a co-author of the book “The People vs. Big Tobacco” while he worked for Bloomberg News and the sole author of a book on Napster, which was selected as a book-of-the-year finalist by the trade group Investigative Reporters & Editors.

He wrote “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet” and “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World.”

Menn began his professional career at The Charlotte Observer. He grew up in the Boston area and graduated with honors from Harvard College, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson.

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