THE BYLINE COMPANY The New York Times, Reporter NET WORTH "Enough to live in San Francisco" AGE 49 ADDRESSmarkoff@nytimes.com
BIO John Markoff, who has been covering Silicon Valley for the New York Times since
1992, is the reporter who has the most influence on what the average American
knows about technology. One way to get a sense of this would be to do a
Lexis-Nexis search and see how many other papers run his stories--the Austin
American-Statesman, San Diego Union-Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer and many
others that subscribe to the Times's wire service. But even that wouldn't really
tell you how many leaders he's reaching, because the papers that don't run his
reports will inevitably find themselves following stories with Markoff's byline.
The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg is the dean of the product review, and
some magazine writers may hold more influence in the trade. But it was Markoff
who in 1988 told mainstream America about the Internet through his reporting on
the Morris computer virus. And today, after more than two decades reporting on
technology, he is the man who tells people what to make of what's going on in the
valley. BEST LINE "One of the things that has kept me writing about technology in
Silicon Valley is watching history unfold. This beat will not be uninteresting
anytime soon." FORWARD TILT Miramax will be bringing out a film version of Takedown: The
Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, the 1995 book
Markoff co-authored with Tsutomu Shimomura, sometime in 2000. Skeet Ulrich will
portray notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick. Who will play Markoff? The reporter says
that "blissfully [he] was cut out" of at least the two versions of the script he
has read. He is the co-author of three books but doesn't have any other immediate
writing plans beyond continuing his daily coverage of Silicon Valley.
