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, where he previously served as associate director of Grade the News, 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.

His staff and freelance work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationally, including 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.

His work at Grade the News has 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.

Stoll has given talks on journalism ethics to professional groups and students in the San Francisco Bay Area. A May 2004 story he wrote for Grade the News inspired a panel discussion at the Center for California Studies' "Envisioning California" government reform conference in October 2004 at Sacramento State University.

In March 2006 he appeared on a televised panel at a symposium for the Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts department at San Francisco State University. The panel was titled "The Newscast of 2015: How Technology May Change the Definition of News."

His San Jose State classes are Information Gathering (Journalism 132) and Editing and News Management (Journalism 133).

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.