John Markoff is best known for his reportage at The New York Times, as well as a series of books on popular technology (Cyberpunk and Takedown are both great). Markoff has been a print journalist riding the wave of technology for over twenty years — he knows his technical stuff, and he’s broken a lot of big stories over the years.

Markoff gave a talk at last year’s EG Conference in Los Angeles. In it, he shared some anecdotes of his career in journalism: a series of stories that he thought were front page news, but apparently his editors disagreed. TED has just posted the talk, and I’ve embedded it below. It’s a nice little talk (just over ten minutes), and worth a look for those of us who still get technology news from the newspaper: