Where’s
Brickman when you need him?
Jeff Pundyk, 7 July 2000
Where’s Brickman when you need him? I’m stuck for a lead and
he’s nowhere to be found.
Gary Brickman died this week, ending an often troubled, often painful and
always fascinating life way too soon — and leaving me with nobody to call
to help craft this lead.
Brickman was a pioneer, one of a handful of people who saw the potential
of the Internet as a news medium in the early Ô90s and who jumped in to both
develop and cover it. He was one of the first influential Internet journalists,
using the Net to write about the Net for the people shaping the Net.
Brickman made the leap from broadcast journalism, where he produced television
reports for ABC, CBS News and Fox, to the Net in 1995, when he launched the
Hyperwocky column for the CyberTimes, an early Website of the New York Times.
In 1996, he joined CMP Media’s InteractiveAge, as managing editor of
InteractiveAge Digital, an e-mail newsletter and Website that pioneered coverage
of the Internet Industry. At IAD, he wrote daily about the industry’s
growing pains, developing a strong voice and making equally strong industry
contacts with the people who were creating the companies that shaped the Net.
Writing the columns he loved so much at IA, he managed a difficult balancing
act — tweaking the industry’s biggest names and reveling in their
victories and in his association with them at the same time.
In 1998, he moved to CMP’s TechWeb, first as News Editor and, in 1998 as
Executive Producer of CMPnet’s Internet Broadcasts. It was here that he started
to weave his traditional broadcast experience into the Net, innovating the
creation of streaming media news broadcasts over the Net. Many of the techniques
he helped develop at TechWeb are being used by today’s Internet newscasts.
He left CMP in April 1999 to join Cnet’s Snap.com and was most recently
Managing Editor, Broadband, at NBC Internet, helping to reinvent the traditional
broadcast network where he started his career.
(Brickman even made a cameo appearance in the independent film, Dream
with the Fishes, in 1997, making him a four-media persona.)
Those are the dry biographical facts. But Brickman was anything but dry.
He lived with tremendous physical and emotional burdens — his body
and his family life were both made a shambles by disease. And yet, there
he was, traveling by van, by plane, by wheelchair to Internet trade
shows and news events on both coasts — always there, always questioning,
probing, pushing.
— Jeff Pundyk
Contact:
Jeff Pundyk
jpundyk@zwirl.com
tel. 646-375-2052
