At the Times, Shira helped launch and wrote On Tech With Shira Ovide, a newsletter about the ways technology is changing our world. For 2 1/2 years, Shira’s newsletter has been a unique, accessible, useful and friendly guide to understanding technology and its influences. She has written about the opportunities to bring more people online and make the most of digital life — and why the best technology is often the boring stuff. She also has shone a light on how powerful tech companies affect freedom of expression, how they have become as influential as governments, and how they alter the livelihoods of people who earn a living online.

Before the Times, Shira was a technology columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, where she was a 2019 finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award in commentary. For nearly a decade before that, Shira was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires covering technology and media and writing a blog about finance and deals. In that role, she once highlighted the eerie similarities between an investor pitch for Facebook stock and a familiar email scam.

Raised in Dayton, Ohio, Shira graduated from Haverford College with a political science degree and earned a graduate degree from Columbia Journalism School. She describes herself as an enthusiastic but terrible cyclist and a beginning bird watcher. (She recently spent hours searching — unsuccessfully — to spot a black-billed cuckoo.) As a child, she was an avid reader of Zillions, a consumer interest magazine for kids from the publisher of Consumer Reports — a fitting start for a future Help Desk journalist.