David Pogue (born March 9, 1963) is a technology writer, technology columnist and commentator. He is a personal technology columnist for the New York Times, an Emmy-winning tech correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, and weekly tech correspondent for CNBC. He has written or co-written seven books in the For Dummies series (including Macintosh computers, magic, opera, and classical music); in 1999, he launched his own series of computer how-to books, called the Missing Manual series, which now includes over 100 titles covering a variety of personal computer operating systems and applications. In 2009, David wrote with collaboration from around 500,000 Twitter followers, "The World According to Twitter"; a book in which he publishes daily questions 'tweeted', and includes the best responses from a selection of his followers.
David Welch Pogue was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.A. the son of Richard Welch Pogue, an attorney and former Managing Partner at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue and Patricia. He is a grandson of L.Welch Pogue and Mary Ellen Edgerton. He is also a great nephew of Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device.
He graduated from Yale University in 1985, summa cum laude with Distinction in Music. He spent ten years working in New York, for a time in the office of Music Theatre International and also intermittently as a Broadway musical conductor.
Pogue married on September 16, 1995, at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jennifer Letitia O'Sullivan, the daughter of Dr. Renee Bennett O'Sullivan of Wellesley, Massachusetts, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. She graduated from Brown University and received her medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania and was a hand and plastic surgeon for four years in Stamford, Connecticut. David and Jennifer are the parents of three children, sons Kelly and Jeffrey and daughter Tia.
On August 29, 2007 he received an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Music) from Shenandoah Conservatory of Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.
Since November 2000, Pogue has served as the New York Times personal-tech columnist; his column, "State of the Art," appears each Thursday on the front page of the Business section. He also writes "From the Desk of David Pogue," a tech-related opinion column that is sent to readers by e-mail. He also maintains a blog at nytimes.com called Pogue's Posts.
Each Thursday, he appears on CNBC's "Power Lunch" in a taped, three-minute comic tech review, which then appears on the New York Times website, nytimes.com, as well as iTunes, YouTube, TiVo, and JetBlue.
Pogue wrote for Macworld Magazine from 1988-2000. His back-page column was called The Desktop Critic. Pogue got his start writing books when Macworld-owner IDG asked him to write Macs for Dummies to follow on the success of the first ...for Dummies book, DOS for Dummies, written by Dan Gookin.
Pogue is a frequent speaker at educational, government, and corporate conferences. In 2009 he was the keynote speaker at the international Summit Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, the largest professional organization of technical writers and editors. Pogue also headlined the annual EduComm Conference, a nationwide gathering of higher education leaders pursuing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform the college experience. He has performed three times at TED, a conference in Monterey, CA: in 2006, a 20-minute talk about simplicity; in 2007, a medley of high-tech song parodies at the piano (or, as Pogue joked, "a tedley,") and most recently in December 2008, talking about cellphones, the cool tricks they can be made to do, and how the phones are often so much better than the companies that market them. In 2008, he performed at the EG conference, also in Monterey. He has also spoken at the 2008 and 2009 ASTD TechKnowldge Conference and expo as a keynote speaker. On March 16, 2009, he was the keynote speaker for the ASSET conference in Huntington, New York. Also on 2009, he gave a conference about Web 2.0 at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. He discussed three trends in technology and also played his entertaining technology songs.
In 2005, Pogue was the subject of a conflict-of-interest controversy. In a New York Times review of a hard drive recovery service, Pogue noted that the service, which can cost from $500 to $2,700, was provided at no charge for the purposes of the review; but when describing the service for National Public Radio's Morning Edition program on September 12, 2005, he failed to mention this. NPR's Vice President of News Bill Marimow later stated that NPR should have either not aired the review or paid for the services itself. Ultimately, the Times paid for the service.
