Stephen Shankland is Head of Content at 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a former science and technology 🏷️#journalist who spent twenty-five years at CNET. He joined the company in 2024 and founded The Tokamak Times, the CFS publication that covers the engineering of 📝SPARC and 📝ARC for readers ranging from policymakers to the general public.
Shankland reported for CNET from October 1998 to March 2024, covering processors, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, materials science, digital photography, and earlier the Google, Linux, and open-source beats. Before that he spent six years at the Los Alamos Monitor as a reporter and managing editor. He is a graduate of Harvard University. He launched The Tokamak Times in December 2024 and remains its dominant byline, publishing explainers on 📝plasma diagnostics, magnet delivery, and factory production, and routinely giving the page over to CFS engineers and scientists rather than executives. In his first post he described the publication's purpose in terms drawn from his reporting years: he had been "frustrated at how hard it was to go one level deeper than the press releases and social media posts."
We hired a working science journalist to cover us from the inside, and then let him publish what our engineers actually say. The Tokamak Times is how we keep the promise that 📝fusion should be legible to people who do not build tokamaks for a living.