Tech Reporter Brad Stone Speaks at J-School

Stone, a longtime tech reporter, writes about Silicon Valley behemoths such as Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook. He is best known as the author of “The
Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”

Speaking to a J200 class on covering technology, Stone advised people looking for jobs in journalism to “go where the good editing is” and to find good
mentors.

“Getting pummeled by a good editor for a while pays good dividends,” he said, recalling how his editor scribbled “What are you doing?” on his first feature
at Newsweek, where he began his career in 1998.

After leaving Newsweek in 2006, Stone covered Apple for The New York Times before joining Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010.

He has covered boom and bust in the Internet economy, as well as the rise of dominant high-tech corporations on the West Coast.

Lecturer Yukari Kane invited Stone to speak to the class because of his mastery of profile-writing. Stone has written about Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s
Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, among other chief executives.

“Often times your challenge as a technology journalist is … to shine a light on how institutions affect people,” Stone said.

To write compelling stories, Stone said he seeks a hundred scenes or anecdotes while reporting. “Right now we’re in a battle for people’s attention,” he
said. “Every paragraph, they’re going to vote with their eyeballs and clicks.”

He said he looks for “a moment, an interaction, or something surprising” to show, not tell.

In addition to creating scenes, Stone advised students to look past the scripted, impersonal image that corporations portray. As an example, he discussed
his mission to find Bezos’ biological father while writing “The Everything Store,” an effort to share something surprising about the CEO and add an
emotional element to his story.

“Not only dig deeper,” he advised, “but throw yourself into these unscripted opportunities. It occasionally pays off. I got lucky and it did.”

By Atia Musazay (’17)