John Markoff became the national computer writer for The New York Times in 1988 and worked there until 2017 covering the Internet, cybersecurity and science and technology. He worked in the paper’s San Francisco bureau beginning in 1992.
Before working for the Times he reported for Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte Magazine and The San Francisco Examiner.
In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation. The Times had previously nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, 1998 and 2000. The San Francisco Examiner nominated him for a Pulitzer in 1987. In 2005, with a group of Times reporters, he received the Loeb Award for business journalism. In 2007 he shared the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Breaking News award. Also that year he was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization’s highest honor.
He left the Times in 2017 to research and write a biography of Stewart Brand. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand was published by Penguin Press in March of 2022. While researching the biography he was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and 2018. In 2018 and 2019 he was a fellow at the Stanford Institute of Human Centered Artificial Intelligence where he is now a Distinguished Fellow.
Markoff is the co-author with Lenny Siegel of The High Cost of High Tech, published in 1985 by Harper & Row. He wrote Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier with Katie Hafner, which was published in 1991 by Simon & Schuster. In 1996 Hyperion published Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, which he co-authored with Tsutomu Shimomura. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, was published in 2005 by Viking Books. Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, was published in f 2015 by HarperCollins Ecco.