Jon Katz

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This article is about the technology and dog writer. For the queer studies professor, see Jonathan D. Katz. For the actor, see Jonathan Katz. For the historian, see Jonathan Ned Katz.
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Jonathan Katz (born 1947) is a U.S. journalist and writer. He is mostly known for his contributions to the online magazine HotWired and the technology website Slashdot.

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Career

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Traditional media

He initially worked as a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe and Washington Post, and later as a producer for CBS Morning News. He wrote a successful series of mystery novels centered around the character Kit DeLeeuw, a former Wall Street financier turned private investigator, based in Rochambeau, New Jersey.

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Online

Expressing disenchantment with "traditional media", he joined HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine, to which he contributed articles as a pundit and media critic.

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Slashdot.org

In 1999, Katz left HotWired to join Slashdot.org. Many of his contributions to Slashdot were focused on the youth subculture of geeks and social misfits. In the article Voices from the Hellmouth, written shortly after the Columbine school shootings near Denver and Littleton, Colorado, he commented on the relationship of the shootings to the angst and social isolation of teenage geeks within high school subcultures.[1]

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Controversy

His writing was frequently not well-received by Slashdot readers. Among the charges often levelled at him were that he was not an authentic geek and was seeking to co-opt and sensationalize geek subculture, that his writings (especially those on technical topics) were uninformed gibberish, and that he had an unhealthy fixation on the Columbine shootings. In the Slashdot subculture, variants on the phrase "in this post-Columbine world" are occasionally used with satirical intent, and are regarded as typical of Katz.

There was a large controversy when Katz posted an article about an e-mail he believed to be from an Afghani teenager named "Junis", writing to him from the newly restored Internet. Katz never revealed the original e-mail, but it was an evident hoax and probably a parody designed to fool Katz. According to Katz, Junis wrote his e-mail from a Commodore computer, which he was now using to download movies, pornography, and MP3s thanks to the recent liberation of Afghanistan. (Commodore computers, built in the 1980s, had no video card, no music capabilities, and restricted Internet access.)

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Writing on Dogs

After Slashdot, Katz left the topic of "geek culture" to begin a new career writing on the topic of dogs, beginning in 2001 with A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me and continuing with The New Work of Dogs and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. He wrote an article about his books on Slashdot, but readers rejected it as advertising and it was widely assumed that he was fired afterwards.[2] Katz has described dogs as having been part of his life since fourth grade, and began writing about them after taking in a difficult border collie. He has written extensively on the way we train dogs, arguing that most approaches fail because they are too inflexible, and because--as dog owners--we over-anthropomorphize our companion animals: "we give them too much credit, make them too complex, muddying our communications" by treating them as "soul mates" rather than understanding and respecting their animal nature.[3]

"I can't imagine life without a dog," Katz said in a 2002 interview. "I don't think dogs are substitutes for people, but I must confess I often find them more reliable."[4]


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List of publications

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Kit DeLeeuw series

  • Death by Station Wagon (1993)
  • The Family Stalker (1994)
  • The Last Housewife (1995)
  • The Father's Club (1996)
  • Death Row (1998)
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Other Publications

  • Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure (1999)
  • Geeks (2000)
  • A Dog Year (2001)
  • The New Work of Dogs (2003)
  • The Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2004)
  • Katz on Dogs (2005)
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References

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External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Katz"
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