Jon Katz

Jon Katz, born August 8, 1947, is an American journalist, author, and photographer whose career has moved through newspapers, magazines, television, early online publishing, fiction, and books about animals. He came of age professionally in print newsrooms, then became one of the writers associated with the first wave of web journalism and technology culture. His work reflects that shift: from crime novels and media criticism to writing about geeks, social outsiders, dogs, farms, and the emotional place animals hold in human lives.

Katz first worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, and later for the CBS Morning News. His criticism, columns, and reviews appeared in Rolling Stone, New York, Wired, GQ, and The New York Times. After expressing “disenchantment with the world of old media,” he joined HotWired, the online version of Wired, where he wrote about technology, culture, and the media. In 1998 he left HotWired after a redesign, then joined Slashdot, where much of his writing focused on geek youth culture and social misfits. His first article for Slate appeared in December 2005, and he later became a regular contributor, with much of that work centered on animals and rural life.

As a novelist, Katz wrote the Kit DeLeeuw mystery series, centered on a former Wall Street financier turned private investigator in the fictional Rochambeau, New Jersey. The series includes Death by Station Wagon (1993), The Family Stalker (1994), The Last Housewife (1995), The Father’s Club (1996), and Death Row (1998). His nonfiction ranged from media and technology books such as Virtuous Reality and Media Rants to Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, published in 2000.

His later books are closely tied to his farm in upstate New York and to his relationships with dogs and other animals. Katz began writing about dogs after taking in a difficult Border Collie, an experience he credited with changing his life by leading him to take up shepherding and move to a farm. Books such as A Dog Year, The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, Katz on Dogs, A Good Dog, Going Home, and Saving Simon explore training, grief, companionship, and the limits of seeing animals as if they were people. “I can’t imagine life without a dog,” he said in 2002. “I don’t think dogs are substitutes for people, but I must confess I often find them more reliable.”

Katz’s work also drew criticism. Some Slashdot readers challenged his technical knowledge after a disputed article about an email he said came from a teenager in Afghanistan. His dog books received favorable reviews in the literary press, but also a hostile reaction from segments of the Border Collie community. In 2014 he published Who Speaks for the Carriage Horses: The Future of Animals in Our World, supporting the continuation of the New York City carriage horse trade. Katz began blogging in 2007 and learned photography at the same time, using his own images, often of animals and rural upstate New York, on his blog and later on his book covers. Readers return to his work for its direct attention to how people think, argue, care, and sometimes misunderstand the animals and technologies they live with.