Joanna Stern: Chautauqua Institution Lecture Series
Route 394, Chautauqua, NY 14722
Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist and NBC/CNBC contributor who has spent the better part of two decades covering gadgets and apps, and helping people make smarter tech decisions. Since 2013, she’s been a personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal where her explanatory reporting — in both writing and video — has garnered numerous awards. Stern opens the Chautauqua Lecture Series week on “The AI Revolution” with an up-to-the-minute primer on how artificial intelligence has developed ever-more-rapidly, and considers where we may be headed as these remarkable and potentially dangerous technologies continue to evolve.
At The Wall Street Journal, Stern’s reporting on AI has included putting fast-food drive-thrus “staffed” by chatbots to the test and examining popular AI photo apps that distort reality. In April 2023, she penned a column about creating an AI version — or deepfake — of herself, highlighting the technology’s double-edged potential. Stern began her technology writing career at Laptop Magazine and then spent three years at Engadget. In 2011, she and several colleagues left Engadget to create the technology news website that would eventually come to be known as The Verge. Prior to joining The Wall Street Journal, Stern was the technology editor at ABC News.
In 2016, Stern received a Gerald Loeb Award for her Wall Street Journal videos, and a second Gerald Loeb Award in 2022 for a series about TikTok. Her documentary about death and technology, “E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to Live Forever,” won the 2021 Emmy in the category of outstanding science, technology or environmental coverage. Stern is a graduate of Union College.