Michael Stoll is a journalist, media critic and journalism educator. He teaches editing and reporting classes at San Jose State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, an award-winning independent watchdog project. He is also a freelance writer specializing in environmental and political reporting, and a First Amendment activist.

Recently Stoll has been active developing the Public Press project, an effort to build a noncommercial Web-print newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was recently invited to write an imaginary retrospective of the project from five years in the future for Columbia Journalism Review.

His staff and freelance work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationally, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Earth Island Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Examiner. He has also written for the Hartford Courant, the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, E/The Environmental magazine, San Francisco Magazine, Quill and SF Weekly. In the late 1990s he reported as a stringer for the Metro section of the New York Times.

From 2003 to 2006 he served as associate director of Grade the News, where his work received recognition from Columbia Journalism Review for exposing the deceptive practices of local television news producers in San Jose and across the country.

In 2006, Grade the News won two national journalism awards: the Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the Media from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award, presented at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in San Francisco.

He is an active member of the Bay Area freedom-of-information community, an adviser to the non-profit online news project Newsdesk.org, and secretary of the board of the Society of Professional Journalists' Northern California chapter. He is an alumnus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.