Julia Angwin

• 1. Silicon Valley Roots

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  Julia Angwin was born in Champaign, Illinois, to university professor parents who moved to Silicon Valley in 1974. They worked in the emerging personal computer industry during those early years of digital history. She grew up in Palo Alto where she learned to code in the fifth grade. During summers, she worked at the Hewlett-Packard Demo Center in Cupertino. This environment shaped her understanding of technology before most children even knew what a computer was. Her academic path led her to the University of Chicago where she graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in mathematics. She later became a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in 1998. She completed an MBA at Columbia University with a concentration in accounting in 1999.

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• 2. From Campus To Newsroom

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  Angwin got her start in journalism as an undergrad at The University of Chicago. She served as editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, from 1991 to 1992. Upon graduation she moved to California where she worked briefly as a business writer for the Contra Costa Times. She then moved to Washington D.C., to work as a reporter for States News Service covering Congress for regional newspapers. In 1996 she joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a technology reporter. Her coverage included several stories about the Justice Department lawsuit against Microsoft. She also led an investigation that revealed how few Blacks and Latinos were employed in Silicon Valley companies. Many leading tech firms had been cited by the U.S. Department of Labor for affirmative action violations. In 2000, The Wall Street Journal hired her as a staff reporter covering business and technology from their New York bureau.

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• 3. Privacy And Bias Investigations

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  During her thirteen years at the Journal, Angwin broke stories and published numerous exposes into the growing tech sector. A the 23rd of November 2009 article by Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler was featured on the front page. It discussed unprecedented numbers of millions of Wikipedia editors quitting. From 2010 to 2013, she led an investigative team that published the Wall Street Journals groundbreaking What They Know series. This exposed how privacy was being eroded with most people completely unaware that it was happening. In 2014, Angwin left The Wall Street Journal to join ProPublica as a senior reporter. In 2016, Angwin was lead author of an article revealing machine bias against Black people in criminal risk assessment. That system used machine learning systems to make predictions. In a 2016 article entitled Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, Angwin revealed that Google had changed its privacy policy. Following publication of her article, Google announced that this precluded advertisement targeting through Gmail keywords.

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• 4. Building The Markup

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  In April 2018, Angwin and Jeff Larson left ProPublica to found The Markup. They described their organization as a nonpartisan nonprofit newsroom producing data-centered journalism. They aimed to uncover societal harms of technology. They were joined by Sue Gardner as a co-founder and several ProPublica staff members. Harvard University based NiemanLab described Angwin and Larson as a journalist-programmer team who uncovered stories about algorithmic bias. Craig Newmark committed $20 million to the publication alongside philanthropic gifts from multiple foundations including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In April 2019, she was dismissed from The Markup. Five of the seven editorial staff immediately resigned in support of her. Over 145 journalists and researchers signed a letter of support. In August, she was reinstated in her role as editor-in-chief and The Markup was reformed with the original editorial staff. The Markup began publishing on the 25th of February 2020 with a staff of 17 reporters, editors and engineers.

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• 5. Books On Digital Culture

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  Angwin is the author of Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America and Dragnet Nation. Michael Agger described Angwins meticulously detailed description of Rupert Murdochs purchase of MySpace in 2005 from Intermix Media as so granular that it passes through boring into surreal. The Washington Posts Scott Rosenberg compared Stealing MySpace to Kara Swishers There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere. The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, and the Los Angeles Times gave Dragnet Nation favorable reviews. In a 2014 interview with Bill Moyers about Dragnet Nation, Angwin described reporters as prime targets for Internet snooping. She called them the canary in the coal mine of internet privacy. She said that as watchdogs for democracy, journalists need to protect their sources. In a 2014 interview with Kirkus Reviews Neha Sharma, Angwin said that she had become aware of data scraping while researching Stealing MySpace. To protect her own digital content, she began using Tails.

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• 6. Honors And Recognition

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  In 2003 Angwin was one of The Wall Street Journals staff reporters whose stories on corporate scandals were acknowledged with a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She shared the 2011 Gerald Loeb Award for Online Enterprise for the story What They Know. In 2017, Angwin was awarded a Scripps Howard award for Digital Innovation alongside four colleagues at ProPublica. Their investigative series entitled Machine Bias examined how computer-generated algorithms used to predict criminality perpetuate racial biases. In 2018, Angwin and her teams work on Automating Hate won the Loeb Award for beat reporting. That series uncovered secret guidelines used by Facebook to inconsistently distinguish between hate speech and political expression. She shared the 2018 Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting for the story Automating Hate. Angwin graduated from the University of Chicago in 1992 with a B.A. in mathematics.

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