Om Malik: Tech journalist whose blog shaped how Silicon Valley saw itself
Technology journalist and GigaOm founder Om Malik helped redefine Silicon Valley coverage through independent blogging, incisive commentary and influential reporting
 "Om Malik: Tech journalist whose blog shaped how Silicon Valley saw itself")
By Clay Risen
Om Malik, a technology journalist and investor whose blog, Gigaom, which he founded in 2001, established him as one of the most important voices in Silicon Valley and helped signal a shift in how the media covered the tech industry, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, California. He was 59. An announcement on his website, Om.co, said that his death, at a hospital, came “after a long health journey with his heart.”
Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism startups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.
“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarised Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”
By 2006, the site had 500,000 readers a month, and Technorati, a blog-tracking platform, ranked it among the 50 most influential blogs. In 2015, when Gigaom shut down, it claimed 6.4 million monthly readers.
The emergence of blogs like Gigaom and of opinionated tech writers like Malik, Kara Swisher and Jason Kottke helped define the next iteration of technology journalism, moving it away from establishment publications and toward singular voices.
Having cut his teeth as a culture and tech journalist in the 1990s for outlets like Forbes.com and Red Herring, Malik was both a believer in the power of technology as a social force and a skeptic of its tendency to evangelise about itself. In 2003 he wrote the book “Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist,” a fierce indictment of the broadband industry.
Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticised the venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”
Malik began his blog somewhat by accident. While still writing for Red Herring, a tech-focused business publication, he found himself writing articles about then-niche topics, like mobile internet and social media, that the magazine didn’t want. “I might have found my art form, right?” he said in a 2016 interview with the Techies website. “It was not traditional journalism, it was not writing news. It was a little bit of opinion. I think my whole past was building up to me being a blogger.”
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