Paul Boutin (born 1961 in Lewiston, Maine, United States) is a magazine writer and editor who writes about technology in a pop-culture context.
Boutin, who began writing for Wired in 1997, writes about social networks and digital media for the New York Times, covers emerging technologies for MIT's Technology Review, contributes essays to Wired and does book reviews for the Wall Street Journal. From 2009-2010 he covered Internet business and culture for VentureBeat. He was a senior writer and editor for Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag from 2006 to 2008, and a tech columnist for Slate from 2002 to 2008. Slate editor Josh Levin has praised "his sense of a good idea, sparkling sentence-level writing, and knack for translating tech-speak."
His work has also appeared in The New Republic, MSNBC, Reader's Digest, Adweek, Engadget, Salon.com, Outside, Cargo, Business 2.0, the Independent Film & Video Monthly, InfoWorld and PC World.
Before turning pro as a journalist, he spent 15 years as an engineer and manager at MIT, where he worked on Project Athena, and at several Internet-related startup companies in Silicon Valley. He lives in Los Angeles, California.