Julia Angwin

• 1. Introduction

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  Five of Julia Angwin's seven editorial colleagues resigned their jobs the moment she was dismissed from the nonprofit newsroom she had co-founded. She had grown up in Palo Alto, learning to code in the 5th grade, and spent summers at the Hewlett-Packard Demo Center in Cupertino. Her parents had moved to the area in 1974, drawn by the personal computer industry still taking shape. A mathematician by training, she spent her career investigating what technology companies were doing to the people who used them. Years later, she would describe journalists as "the canary in the coal mine" of internet privacy. What kind of journalism inspires that kind of loyalty?

• 2. From Code to Byline

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  Angwin graduated from the University of Chicago in 1992 with a degree in mathematics, not journalism. She had served as editor-in-chief of the university's newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, from 1991 to 1992. After graduation, she worked briefly as a business writer for the Contra Costa Times. Then she relocated to Washington, D.C., covering Congress for regional newspapers through States News Service.

  In 1996, the San Francisco Chronicle hired her as a technology reporter. Her coverage included the Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft. She also led an investigation documenting how few Black and Latino workers were employed across Silicon Valley's leading companies. Many of those same firms had been cited by the U.S. Department of Labor for affirmative action violations.

  She was named a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in 1998, and completed an MBA there with a concentration in accounting in 1999. Those credentials opened the door to The Wall Street Journal the following year.

• 3. What They Know

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  In 2000, The Wall Street Journal brought Angwin into its New York bureau as a staff reporter. Three years later, she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Those stories examined the history and scale of corporate scandals in the United States.

  On the 23rd of November 2009, Angwin co-wrote a front-page article with Geoffrey A. Fowler about Wikipedia's dwindling volunteer editors. The piece described editors quitting in unprecedented numbers. But the investigation that would define her Journal tenure was still ahead.

  From 2010 to 2013, Angwin led the team behind the Journal's "What They Know" series. The reporting exposed how tracking companies were harvesting personal data from users who had no idea it was happening. Angwin shared the Gerald Loeb Award for Online Enterprise in 2011 for that work.

  In her next role at ProPublica, she would become a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a second time.

• 4. Algorithms and Accountability

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  In 2016, Angwin led a ProPublica investigation into the risk-assessment software that criminal courts were using to predict reoffending. The reporting showed that the machine learning systems behind those tools produced results skewed against Black defendants. The work, produced alongside four colleagues, earned a Scripps Howard Award for Digital Innovation in 2017.

  Also in 2016, Angwin reported that Google had quietly changed its privacy policy. The change would allow Google to merge users' personally identifiable information with their online activity data. After the article ran, Google announced that the new policy would not extend to targeting advertisements through Gmail keywords.

  At ProPublica, Angwin and colleagues also turned their attention to how Facebook handled hate speech. Their "Automating Hate" series uncovered the secret internal guidelines Facebook used to decide what counted as hate speech versus political expression, revealing significant inconsistencies. Angwin shared the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting in 2018 for that series.

  She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist during her time at ProPublica. She left the organization in April 2018 to co-found a new kind of newsroom.

• 5. Building The Markup

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  Jeff Larson left ProPublica alongside Angwin, bringing several colleagues with them. Their new publication, The Markup, described itself as "nonpartisan" and was built around what they called "data-centered journalism." Sue Gardner joined as a third co-founder. Harvard's NiemanLab described the Angwin-Larson partnership as a "journalist-programmer team."

  Craig Newmark committed $20 million to The Markup's launch. Philanthropic support also came from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center, contributed as well.

  In April 2019, a leadership crisis at The Markup drew an immediate response from the journalism community. Over 145 journalists and researchers from outside the newsroom signed a public letter in Angwin's support. By August 2019, she had been reinstated as editor-in-chief, and the original editorial staff rejoined her.

  Evelyn Larrubia, a public radio veteran, joined as managing editor. Nabiha Syed, a free speech lawyer, became president. The Markup began publishing on the 25th of February 2020, with a staff of 17 reporters, editors, and engineers.

  Blacklight, a privacy inspector, and Citizen Browser, designed to examine Facebook's algorithmic activity, were among the custom tools The Markup built and published. Sisi Wei replaced Angwin as editor-in-chief in 2022. Angwin left The Markup in February 2023. Her first book, "Stealing MySpace," had been in print for over a decade by the time The Markup launched.

• 6. Dragnet Nation

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  In 2009, Angwin published "Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America." At its center was Rupert Murdoch's 2005 purchase of MySpace from Intermix Media. In the New York Times "Sunday Book Review," Michael Agger called Angwin's account of that acquisition "so granular that it passes through boring into surreal." Scott Rosenberg of the Washington Post compared the book to Kara Swisher's account of the AOL Time Warner debacle.

  "Dragnet Nation" followed in 2014. The book examined what mass digital surveillance was doing to people who had little awareness it was happening. The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, and the Los Angeles Times all gave it favorable reviews. In an interview with Kirkus Reviews, Angwin said that researching "Stealing MySpace" was what first made her aware of data scraping. After that discovery, she began using Tails to protect her own digital information.

  Her daughter started a cryptography business called DiceWARE Passwords while still in middle school, focused on selling secure handwritten passwords.