During his career, Streitfeld wrote for
The Washington Post, the
Los Angeles Times, and, as of September 2025, is a technology reporter for
The New York Times. Since 1999, he has reported from San Francisco.
Washington Post At
The Washington Post, Streitfeld covered books and publishing between 1987 and 1998; for three more years, he covered Silicon Valley and technology for the
Post from San Francisco. In 1997, Streitfeld identified
Joe Klein as Anonymous, the author of the bestselling book about the
Clinton presidential campaign,
Primary Colors. Streitfeld, a book collector, spotted a
galley proof, a pre-publication version of the novel, listed for sale in an antiquarian bookseller's catalog. The proof reproduced handwritten changes, which Streitfeld sent to a handwriting expert, who compared the notes to Joe Klein's handwriting, confirming that he was the author. Streitfeld has reported extensively on
Amazon's business practices, dating back to the 1990s, when the company was primarily an online bookstore. In 1998, Streitfeld gave
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, his first tour of the Washington Post, which Bezos purchased in 2013. "The editors there thought Amazon was cute, interesting, a frill — not something transformative. The notion that the Post would one day be owned by the guy with the goofy laugh sitting in front of them was literally inconceivable.”
New York Times In 2007, Streitfeld joined
The New York Times as Chicago business reporter and later covered technology subjects. Streitfeld was one of a team of
New York Times reporters who won the 2013
Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series of 10 articles on the business practices of
Apple and other technology companies. Streitfeld's contribution focused on freelance programmers and how hard it could be to make a living making apps for the
iPhone. In May 2014, Streitfeld broke the story of
Amazon.com's negotiating tactics with publishing house
Hachette, which he continued to cover for multiple months. The reporting on the topic by
The New York Times and Streitfeld was the subject of a piece by
The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in October 2014. In January 2015,
Melville House published
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview, a collection edited by Streitfeld. The introduction details his friendship with Marquez and the circumstances of their talks on two continents. In August 2015, Streitfeld and
New York Times colleague
Jodi Kantor co-authored
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace. The 6000-word story generated more than 6600 comments, the largest number of comments on a story in
The New York Times history and the
Times story reporting this fact drew over 200 comments. Since 2015, Streitfeld has edited books in the "Last Interview" series for
Melville House. The books collect interviews with authors. In addition to collections by
Gabriel García Márquez, he edited volumes focused on
Philip K. Dick,
Ursula Le Guin,
Hunter S. Thompson, and
David Foster Wallace.
Maureen Corrigan gave a favorable review to the Philip K. Dick collection on
NPR's
Fresh Air. Streitfeld's biography
Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry was published by
Mariner Books in March 2026. ==Popular culture==