Early life and education
Collins is from the U.S. state of Massachusetts, growing up in Salem and Byfield. [1] His mother is a librarian. [4] [5] At age 12, he mentioned Mark Cuban in his blog; Collins' start in journalism came when Cuban came across the blog and invited him to write about sports for the Dallas Mavericks website. [6] [7] As a teenager, he wrote for the Mavericks site and wrote sports columns on a nationally syndicated children's website about sports. [1]
He attended Emerson College between 2006 and 2010, graduating with a bachelor's degree in print journalism. [4] [1] While enrolled at Emerson, he was a music columnist for The Berkeley Beacon , the college's student newspaper, [2] [4] and wrote about sports for the Boston Globe [1] and as an intern at Slam. [8] [6] Covering sports at Slam led him to cover pranksters publishing videos of them heckling sports analyst Stephen A. Smith, [9] to which he attributes the start of his interest in covering media manipulation and the "weird internet". [6] During college, he was a roommate of Chris Hurst, with whom he co-hosted a sports and humor radio show as an undergraduate. [2] [10] [1]
Professional career
Early career and Esquire
Following his graduation from Emerson, Collins continued to work at Slam before performing social media work for Hulu. [4] Following his time at Hulu, Collins became a news editor of Esquire in 2013, [4] [11] where he remained for a year until he was hired by The Daily Beast . [4]
The Daily Beast
Between 2014 and 2018, Collins worked in various roles for The Daily Beast as a senior news editor and technology reporter. [2] [5] While Collins was employed at The Daily Beast, Hurst's girlfriend Alison Parker was shot and killed on live television. [10] Though Collins had not met Parker, [10] the incident and its aftermath deeply affected him; he started directly contacting conspiracists who called Hurst and Parker "crisis actors" and trying (usually fruitlessly) to inform them they were mistaken. [12] He then decided to report a beat covering online conspiracy theories and the far right. [2] [4]
At The Daily Beast, Collins frequently reported alongside researcher Brandy Zadrozny, who had joined the publication in 2013. [5] When offered an opportunity to work at NBC News in March 2018, Collins accepted it on the condition that he would be allowed to bring Zadrozny along to join him. [2]
NBC News
In 2018, Collins and Zadrozny departed The Daily Beast to join NBC News. [2] [5] Collins covered "disinformation, extremism and the internet" at NBC News, writing for its website and appearing on MSNBC. [13] [14] [15] His and Zadrozny's coverage of QAnon and related topics while at NBC News has been cited by scholars in the field. [16] [17] [18] [19]
In December 2022, following controversial comments Collins made on social media that NBC says ran afoul of its social media standards, NBC temporarily suspended Collins from covering Elon Musk and Twitter. [20] [21] The National Review had criticized an October 2022 tweet by Collins about Twitter changes under Musk potentially affecting the outcomes of the midterm elections, [22] assessing his concern as only arising if Twitter moderation policies "might affect political outcomes in the wrong direction" and calling him "not actually interested in anything other than power". [23] Collins' final story for NBC News, published in October 2023, covered Musk's strategy in choosing to purchase Twitter. [24]
Collins was part of the NBC News team whose reporting on the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Breaking News. [25] The 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism gave Collins "Special recognition for incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war". [26] [27] His memo to the judges urged fellow journalists to "be better at extolling truth — based in empathy, democracy, and human rights — than fearmongers have become at selling profitable lies." [28] While at NBC, Collins also continued to write for Slam, [29] wrote about conspiracists and journalistic approaches for Nieman Lab, [30] [31] and spoke to On the Media about Kiwi Farms. [32] [33]
Collins, weary of the emotional toll of covering disinformation and its effects, [34] resigned from NBC News in January 2024 to work on writing a book "about all of the people who had manipulated our media over the last 10 years through the internet". [35] [36]
Global Tetrahedron
In April 2024, Collins was announced as and began his role as the CEO of Global Tetrahedron, a company that purchased the satirical website The Onion . Its name is a reference to a fictional company described in Onion publications. [3] The purchase originated from Collins reading a January 24 Adweek report [37] that then-owner G/O was looking to offload the magazine, among other titles, [38] [35] and then posting on Bluesky asking, "So uh how do we buy The Onion?" [39] His post spurred conversation with people who then formed Global Tetrahedron and successfully purchased the property. [34] Collins moved from New York to Chicago for the job, [35] accompanied by his partner, Kat Abughazaleh, who later decided to pursue a local Congressional seat. [40]
Collins later said that a reason he "tried as hard as I could to rescue" The Onion was to prevent Musk from buying it, [41] following Musk's unsuccessful attempts to buy the publication in 2014 and 2019, [42] and to keep it from being turned into an "AI slop farm". [43] He noted that, unlike political journalism, satire is "completely unbeholden" and "allowed to say, 'Actually, one side has really totally co-opted this conversation for political points'", pointing to transphobia as an example of an issue where satire is more equipped to "go after people in power". [36] According to Collins, he does not attempt to influence The Onion's editorial choices: "I've never touched Onion copy. I just do businessy stuff." [44]
As Global Tetrahedron CEO, Collins oversaw the company's attempted purchase of InfoWars , aiming to relaunch it with satire about the far right and conspiracy theorists, as well as genuine gun violence prevention information. [45] The purchase attempt was put on hold, [46] and eventually rejected by the federal bankruptcy court which had overseen the auction. [47]
Collins delivered the 2025 John H. Mitchell Lecture at the University of Michigan, in a series featuring "ethically minded lecturers from the creative industries". [48]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
