Tech reporter Markoff retires from NY Times

John Markoff, a technology reporter at the New York Times, has retired after 28 years at the paper.

In a farewell ceremony last week, Markoff said:

I guess what’s most interesting to me is that I have failed to make the last transition, which has a lot to do with why I’m leaving now.

That’s another irony — that I was one of the first to write about the digital world, but when it really arrived it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be a digital native.

When blogging began, John Dvorak told me that there was no point in doing it unless you posted at least seven times a day. “Why would I want to do that?” I thought. I had already worked for an afternoon daily and I never wanted to work for a wire service.

Yet another irony. The one thing I will probably be remembered for is saying that I believed that blogging would be “the CB radio of the 21st century.”

More recently I watched the Times’ “Snow Fall” experiment, followed by Facebook Live, with a growing awareness that I began as a print reporter and I will go away that way.

Markoff was one of a team of Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for a series of 10 articles on the business practices of Apple and other technology companies.

He graduated from Whitman College and previously worked at the San Francisco Examiner and Byte magazine.