IoT Journalist and Pioneer Stacey Higginbotham Steps Back After More Than Two Decades of Tech Reporting

After more than twenty years on the front lines of technology journalism, veteran reporter and prominent Internet of Things analyst Stacey Higginbotham has officially stepped back from producing her weekly newsletter and podcast. Higginbotham announced the decision in a farewell post originally published on August 18, 2023, marking the end of an era for her dedicated following of tech enthusiasts, engineers, and industry professionals.

While the closure of her signature weekly newsletter and podcast represents a major transition, Higginbotham emphasized that it is not a complete departure from the public sphere. She plans to remain active on social media platform Bluesky and will occasionally publish independent newsletters when pressing industry matters demand her attention. Furthermore, she is embarking on a new consulting role with the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, where she will focus heavily on the critical cybersecurity and privacy challenges associated with connected devices.

The decision brings a temporary close to an independent publishing venture that Higginbotham launched in 2016. At the time, her move raised eyebrows across the media landscape. She walked away from a prestigious role as a senior editor at Fortune, bucking conventional career wisdom to establish her own independent media brand. Many questioned the viability of leaving an established, mainstream publication to focus entirely on a niche emerging market.

However, Higginbotham’s intuition proved prescient. She wanted to dig deeply into the societal and technological issues that would inevitably arise as computing was embedded into virtually everything around us. Over the years, thousands of subscribers and numerous corporate sponsors joined her on that journey. Reflecting on her independent run, Higginbotham expressed deep gratitude to her audience, noting that she would never have been able to sustain the enterprise without their dedicated time, trust, and shared stories.

Looking back across her career, which spanned the formative years of the consumer smart home and the expansive industrial IoT landscape, Higginbotham has maintained a clear-eyed view of how connected technology has evolved. When she first began covering the smart home ecosystem in 2012, the promise of automation was frequently accompanied by mounting user complexity and subtle threats to personal privacy. Over time, as countless hardware startups launched, pivoted, or quietly folded, the underlying business models of connected products shifted dramatically.

According to Higginbotham, the commercial strategy behind many everyday items began toggling aggressively between expensive recurring subscription models and rampant corporate data collection. Beyond the domestic sphere, the footprint of connected technology expanded into workplaces and public environments, where advanced monitoring tools were increasingly deployed to track employees, optimize productivity to absolute limits, and prioritize corporate bottom lines above all else.

In recent years, the tech sector’s broader embrace of environmental, social, and governance initiatives has driven corporate investments toward carbon reduction and operational efficiency. Yet, Higginbotham observed that these corporate efforts often feel insufficient—serving at times as a form of corporate greenwashing that masks underlying systemic issues and environmentally questionable practices.

Despite her deep affection for technology and her foundational belief that innovative problem-solvers can genuinely change the world for the better, the relentless pace of daily news coverage ultimately took its toll. After spending more than two decades immersed in the immediate news cycle—with precious little time to step back and analyze the long-term, macro-level implications of the products she covered—Higginbotham reached a point of professional burnout.

This fatigue, she noted, bred a growing cynicism toward new startups and research initiatives, dulling her enthusiasm for truly novel and promising ideas. By stepping back from the daily grind of production, she hopes to clear her perspective and rediscover her passion for human ingenuity and technological storytelling.

Even as she takes a much-needed break from regular journalistic publishing, Higginbotham’s professional focus remains anchored in consumer advocacy. Through her work with the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, alongside potential freelance contributions to other publications, she will continue championing user safety, security, and digital privacy.

Higginbotham encourages her readers, sources, and industry peers to keep in touch as she navigates this next chapter. She remains eager to hear firsthand accounts of user experiences with connected technology as she collaborates with others to make the digital ecosystem safer and more equitable for everyone.