An homage to Om Malik

Kara Swisher, one of the founders of Re/code and a former founder of All Things D, writes about what Om Malik, the founder of GigaOm who stepped away from tech journalism on Thursday, has meant to others.

Swisher writes, “While Om has not been my only touchstone in the critical department of hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a show-that’s-all-ours — hello, Walt! — there is no question that his launch of Gigaom back then was one of the major watershed moments of my career.

“I remember sitting in my office at the Wall Street Journal and thinking: Wait. What?

“Having long been on the then-gravy train of working for a large and powerful newspaper — first at the Washington Post and then at the Journal — the kind of work Om was doing without all the claptrap of supposed media power was hard not to be riveted by.

“A sassy tech blog with class and standards and ethics and a big, big, voice? A well-regarded journalist who stepped away from a huge media company — in his case, Time Inc. — to do his own thing? All with the fantastic cigar and the ridonkulous hat and taking his fine reporting and writing and doing it in the forthright way we all knew all along it should be written?

“That is pretty much what made me realize that what Walt Mossberg and I had already been doing with our D: All Things Digital conference — started years earlier — could really be a 365/7/24 thing. It was an idea we had always wanted to launch for years, but never did for a variety of reasons. But seeing Om do it so well made all the difference in finally following through on our belief in 2007 that it was well past time to disrupt media.”

Read more here.