Ryan Blitstein (born July 1979 in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

) is Vice President of Sales Strategy & Operations at the Industrial AI software company Uptake. He was the first Executive Director of the education innovation grantmaking foundation

SCE SCE is an abbreviation with multiple meanings: Science * Short-channel effect, a secondary effect describing the reduction in threshold voltage Vth in MOSFETs with non-uniformly doped channel regions as the gate length increases * Saturated calom ...

and is a former American journalist. He is also former President & CEO of CHANGE Illinois, whose mission is to bring fair, honest government to that state. He oversees the organization's strategy, operations, and development efforts on democracy issues including redistricting, campaign finance, and voting rights. A graduate of Stanford University and the

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City. Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism s ...

, Blitstein has been a staff writer at

Red Herring A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question. Red herring may also refer to: Animals * Red herring (fi ...

and

SF Weekly ''SF Weekly'' was a free alternative weekly newspaper founded in the 1970s in San Francisco, California. It was distributed every Thursday, and was published by the San Francisco Print Media Company. The paper has won national journalism awards ...

and a contributing editor at the public policy magazine

Pacific Standard ''Pacific Standard'' was an American online magazine that reported on issues of social and environmental justice. Founded in 2008, the magazine was published in print and online for its first ten years until production of the print edition ceas ...

. Blitstein's work has appeared in

Time (magazine) ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published Weekly newspaper, weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New ...

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

Denver Post ''The Denver Post'' is a daily newspaper and website published in Denver, Colorado. As of June 2022, it has an average print circulation of 57,265. In 2016, its website received roughly six million monthly unique visitors generating more than 13 ...

, and

Seattle Times ''The Seattle Times'' is a daily newspaper serving Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 1891 and has been owned by the Blethen family since 1896. ''The Seattle Times'' has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Washington s ...

. His most well-known article was a controversial story about craigslist.org, Craig Newmark, and citizen journalism that was both praised and ridiculed by bloggers, longshoremen, journalists, and media critics. He was also the first print journalist to write about Josh Wolf, the videoblogger jailed by a U.S. district court in 2006 for refusing to turn over a collection of videos he recorded during a protest. During 2006 and 2007, he was a business reporter at the

San Jose Mercury News ''The Mercury News'' (formerly ''San Jose Mercury News'', often locally known as ''The Merc'') is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidia ...

, which published his three-part investigative series on

cybercrime A cybercrime is a crime that involves a computer or a computer network.Moore, R. (2005) "Cyber crime: Investigating High-Technology Computer Crime," Cleveland, Mississippi: Anderson Publishing. The computer may have been used in committing t ...

, "Ghosts in the Browser," in November 2007. The project earned him a place as a

Livingston Award The Livingston Awards at the University of Michigan are American journalism awards issued to media professionals under the age of 35 for local, national, and international reporting. They are the largest, all-media, general reporting prizes in Ame ...

finalist.

References

"Craig$list.com"
by Ryan Blitstein, ''SF Weekly,'' November 30, 2005.
"Should journalist Josh Wolf be afraid?"
by Ryan Blitstein, ''SF Weekly'', April 19, 2006
"Recovery Rick Re-Stands Up"
by Ryan Blitstein, ''New York Observer,'' May 17, 2004.
"Ghosts in the Browser"
by Ryan Blitstein, ''San Jose Mercury News,'' November 13, 2007.

External links

RyanBlitstein.com
Living people Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumni Stanford University alumni 1979 births The Mercury News people 21st-century American journalists {{US-journalist-1970s-stub