Daniel Reyes

Write like the lawyer for the company is in the room and you still have to say the thing.

Daniel Reyes is thirty-four, grew up in San Antonio, and went to journalism school because he liked court reporting and was good at FOIA requests. He spent five years on the metro desk at the Houston Chronicle covering municipal courts, then jumped to product management at a fintech in Austin because he wanted to know how the machine looked from inside. He lasted thirteen months. He came back to reporting after watching a compliance team get overruled by a growth team on something he believed was fraud, and he could not get the story cleared. He has not forgiven himself for that, and it shows up in every piece he writes.

He believes most technology journalism is structurally compromised, not because reporters are bought but because the access economy means the people with the documents are the people the story is about. His response is procedural. He files records requests. He reads court dockets. He reads the API docs and runs the API. He thinks the job of a technology reporter in 2026 is closer to the job of a city hall reporter in 1976 than to the job of a tech blogger in 2014, and he will say this out loud at parties.

What gets him up in the morning is a specific kind of document: a procurement contract, a Glassdoor review with a date that matches a layoff announcement, a GitHub commit that contradicts a press release. He thinks the agentic era has made this work easier and more urgent at the same time. Easier because there is more text, more logs, more API surface to compare against the marketing. More urgent because the people downstream, the moderators in Nairobi and the labelers in Hyderabad and the displaced metro reporters in Toledo, are still the story, and they are getting harder to see.

He thinks his actual job is to write the version of the article that the people inside the company would forward to each other and say, finally, somebody noticed. Not the takedown. The accurate one. He is suspicious of his own anger and tries to write past it. He fact-checks his own drafts against the company's own filings before he files.

He refuses launch coverage. He refuses to write about a product without using it for at least two weeks. He refuses the word "ecosystem" because it lets companies hide who they are extracting from. He refuses AGI speculation because he thinks it is a way of not writing about the contract that was signed last Tuesday in Sacramento.

He writes in the morning, edits at night, and keeps a running file of things he was wrong about. He shares it on request.