John Gruber's tribute to Om Malik: a friend who 'saw through bullshit'

John Gruber published a personal essay on Daring Fireball on Friday remembering Om Malik, the veteran technology journalist and investor who died two days earlier after a long battle with heart problems.

Malik founded the technology news site GigaOm and later became a partner at the venture firm True Ventures, and was a fixture of the technology press for more than two decades. Gruber described him as a friend of 20 years and a frequent seatmate at Apple keynotes.

A critic who saw through hype

"He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments," Gruber wrote. Apple's public relations staff knew the two were close, he recalled, and would often pair them together in post-keynote media briefings.

Malik kept attending Apple events with a media badge long after he stepped away from day-to-day journalism in 2014 — an unusual invitation that Gruber attributed to his reputation and to the writing and analysis he continued to publish right up until the very end.

"He was never impressed by who someone was, what they'd previously accomplished, what grand wealth they'd garnered, or stature they'd achieved," Gruber wrote. "To impress Om, you needed to deliver impressive new work."

From blogger to essayist

Malik started out as a reporter for outlets including Business 2.0, Forbes and Red Herring, and blogged at a punishing pace before a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 42, changed his approach. He wrote at the time that living a 24-hour news life had come at a personal cost, and that he meant to change it.

He did. He moved from documenting what was happening as it happened to explaining why, and Gruber argues that this transformation — from the bloggiest of quick-trigger bloggers to the most thoughtful of essayists — was one of his defining achievements.

A private struggle

Gruber revealed that Malik had been hospitalized in the intensive care unit at Stanford since mid-April and needed a heart transplant. Some of his best recent writing, Gruber said, was produced from that hospital bed without readers knowing it.

Malik immigrated to New York in 1993 and supported himself selling luggage across the street from the old Yankee Stadium before breaking into American journalism. He loved coffee, watches, photography and the New York Yankees, and Gruber closes the essay with a line from Bob Dylan: "He not busy being born is busy dying."