Josh Quittner (born February 12, 1957) is an American journalist. He is CEO of Decrypt Media, a website which covers

cryptocurrencies A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records ...

, NFTs and Web3.

Early life and education

Born in

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

, Quittner grew up in

Reading, Pennsylvania Reading ( ; ) is a city in Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. The city had a population of 95,112 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census and is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, fourth-most populous ...

. He is a graduate of

Grinnell College Grinnell College ( ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was founded in 1846 when a group of Congregationalism in the United States, Congregationalis ...

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 sch ...

. He is married to Michelle Slatalla and has three daughters, including Ella Quittner, who is also a journalist and screenwriter.

Career

He has co-authored five books with his wife, including ''Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace'' (Harper-Collins, 1995) about the New York-based hacker group Masters of Deception, ''Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How it Challenged Microsoft'' (1998), ''Mother's Day'' (1993), ''Flame War: A Cyberthriller'' (1998), and ''Shoofly Pie to Die'' (1992). Quittner spent the first twelve years of his career as a newspaper reporter. He was a crime reporter and a general assignment writer before he started to write about technology from the consumer side at ''

Newsday ''Newsday'' is a daily newspaper in the United States primarily serving Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI" ...

'' in 1992. Quittner then freelanced for ''

Wired Magazine ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...

'' and was the original domain-name holder of mcdonalds.com, which he registered for an early ''Wired'' piece on domain-name squatting. He later turned the domain over to Mcdonald's after they donated $3,500 to a public school in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

for computers and internet access at his request. Quittner also freelanced for the webzine

HotWired ''Hotwired'' (1994–1999) was the first commercial online magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of the print magazine Wired (magazine), ''Wired'', ''Hotwired'' carried original content. History Andrew Anker, Wired ...

, which ran his manifesto of the "Info Revolution" titled "The Birth of Way New Journalism," a riff on

New Journalism New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form no ...

that "became an instant cliché." He joined Time Inc. as a staff writer in 1995. During his initial seven years at ''

Time Magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps as ''TIME'') is an American news magazine based in New York City. It was published weekly for nearly a century. Starting in March 2020, it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York Cit ...

'' he worked for

Pathfinder Pathfinder, Path Finder or Pathfinders may refer to: Aerospace * ''Mars Pathfinder'', a NASA Mars Lander * NASA Pathfinder, a high-altitude, solar-powered uncrewed aircraft * Space Shuttle ''Pathfinder'', a Space Shuttle test simulator Arts and ...

, Time Inc.'s first independent online presence, where he launched the ''Netly News'', one of the web's first daily news publications. He then became the editor of ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

s spinoff technology supplement ''Time Digital'', later called ''ON Magazine''. From April 2002 until September 2007 Quittner was the editor of '' Business 2.0''. Quittner briefly revived "Netly News" as the name of a Business 2.0 blog. He also owns the domain name roofmagazine.com, which currently Roof, a sporadically updated real-estate blog. After Business 2.0, he served briefly as an executive editor at Fortune Magazine, working at its San Francisco bureau, before rejoining Time in April 2008 as an editor-at-large. From 2011 to 2018, he was the editorial director at Flipboard. In 2018, Quittner and Ryan Bubinski co-founded ''

Decrypt In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plai ...

'', an online news website focused on

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

, Web3 and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Quittner, Josh Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumni American technology writers Grinnell College alumni Living people 1957 births Taft School alumni