LA Times tech reporter O’Brien quitting to move to France

Chris O’Brien, a technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has resigned and is moving to France with his wife, who has a three-year post-doctoral in Toulouse.

O’Brien writes on Medium, “My departure from Silicon Valley, and my job as a tech journalist at the LA Times, will hardly make a dent in a region where tech journalists seem to be spawning faster than tribbles. I leave the U.S. knowing that while journalists and news organizations are scurrying away from covering boring, useless stuff like state legislatures, there are 1,000 people on standby to write a blog post if Jony Ive barfs out of his nose.

“In the short-attention theater that is Silicon Valley, it seems so long ago that I landed a job at the Mercury News in 1999 to cover telecommunications. After proposing to my wife in front of the copy machine in the Durham, NC bureau of The News & Observer newsroom (true story!), I dragged her out to San Francisco for a one-year trial period.

“Fifteen years, two kids, and one mortgage later, I find myself feeling lucky to have spent so much time in such an extraordinary place. There are a few images and stories, though, in particular that stick out.”

Read more here.

O’Brien, a graduate of Duke University, worked at The (Raleigh) News and Observer from 1992 to 1999, when he joined the San Jose Mercury News. He became the paper’s business columnist in 2008. He moved to the Times in 2012.