Om Malik, one of the Internet’s earliest technology journalists and analysts who dedicated much of his adult life to the craft, died this week after a prolonged heart condition, according to a statement from his family.
Malik was 60 years old at the time of his passing, and he died while surrounded by family and friends at Stanford Hospital, the statement said.
He is perhaps best known as the founder and chief publisher of GigaOm, but his imprint on the Internet’s coverage of technology and culture started years earlier. In the early 1990s, he was a senior writer for Forbes, eventually becoming part of the founding group that helped launch the business publication’s website.
In 2000, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, initially to write for a magazine called Business 2.0 before founding his own website one year later. GigaOm was one of the first technology blogs of the late dot-com era, attracting an audience of more than half a million monthly visitors and cementing itself as a source for scoops and deep analysis on consumer technology trends.
Malik sparked some of the earliest coverage of the mid-2000s social media boom, including one of the first full profiles on Twitter in 2006, the same year it launched. That spotlight attracted journalists and academics to the platform in waves, with Twitter — now X.com — evolving into a real-time hub of news and information that further eroded the imaginary wall between establishment journalists, celebrities, independent writers and solo publishers.
“As weird as it sounds, a common dictum around TechCrunch is, write every post thinking that Om is your audience,” tech writer Alexia Tsotsis wrote in a 2013 profile. The profile coincided with Malik becoming an American citizen.
His tech journalism took a bit of a backseat in 2007, when he suffered his first heart attack at 41. A biography on his Wikipedia page, likely self-authored, said the likeliest reason for his ailment was “incessant smoking of cigars and cigarettes as well as drinking alcohol and eating unhealthy foods.”
“The heart attack forced him to reconsider his priorities,” the webpage said, citing a 2008 New York Times article that largely focused on his health issues.
In that era, it wasn’t unusual for tech-focused journalists to live online, almost 24 hours a day. Eat at the computer, work out not too far from a smartphone, check the tablet on the train, plan family vacations around product announcements. Like so many others, Malik’s professional life was supported by his ongoing personal investments into the craft, and it eventually caught up with him.
“The trouble with a personal brand is, you’re yoked to a machine,” publisher and blogger Paul Kedrosky told the Times. “You feel huge pressure to not just do a lot, but to do a lot with your name on it. You have pressure to not just be the CEO, but at the same time to write, and to do it all on a shoestring. Put it all together, and it’s a recipe for stress through the roof.”
GigaOm did not show signs of suffering — at least not right away. Between 2008 and 2010, the company raised more than $12 million in funding, including a $6 million round that valued the publication at more than $40 million. The money allowed Malik to hire supporting writers and editors, and to eventually acquire an online media hub called PaidContent, which gave the appearance that the blog was in it for the long haul.
It wasn’t meant to be. In 2015, Malik published a surprise announcement that said GigaOm was shutting down. Contributing writers and editors were let go, and few of them returned when the brand was sold months later to Knowingly Corporation, which was largely predicated on GigaOm’s events business.
Malik spent the rest of his years blogging on his own website and posting excerpts of his thoughts to his X.com account, which sustained more than 1.1 million followers. One of his last posts was critical of Bloomberg for its coverage of Amazon Web Services, and a kudos to tech evangelist Ed Zitron for saying “scary things” where others don’t.
What Zitron dared to say: Companies spending billions of dollars in artificial intelligence investments are unlikely to see many long-term returns.
“It’s not about the inevitability (of) the Internet, or commerce or AI,” Malik wrote. “The madness is about the math that does not make sense. AI is inevitable. So is math madness.”
The tweet makes you stop and think. Om Malik was good at that, right up to the end.
