John C. Abell is the managing director of news at LinkedIn. Abell was the founding New York City bureau chief of wired.com, a position he took up in 2008.
Previously, he spent 26 years at Reuters where his editorial career spanned the advent of the Internet era. The Portabubble was the road warrior's tool of choice when he got started, and his first mobile reporting tool was a TRS-80 (which he still has). Now he doesn't leave home without his iPhone.
Abell has been a news dictationist, reporter, correspondent, editor, and bureau chief, and, in all-too-brief stint with the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a consultant on journalism best practices.
He started Reuters New Media's first joint venture—the Reuters/Variety Entertainment Report—and was running this service out of the offices of Daily Variety in Hollywood when, in the early '90s, the Internet started being something you didn't just see in quotes.