An Omen, an Aide-de-Camp and a Gatekeeper

One day while we were still tinkering with what departments and columns OEM might include, a bombshell landed on my desk, Wired Magazine.

It was big and intoxicatingly beautiful. Its first issue had perhaps three times the plunk value the best edition of OEM would ever have. Its design was what our managing editor, Tim Moran, would call outre. It was as “out there” as a jazz riff.

And the content rose above the secular corporate scrimmages of convergence OEM aimed to cover. Wired was about tech culture and lifestyle. Its first issues profiled an edgy science fiction author, included stories written by a New York Times reporter, and sold at newsstands for $5 a pop. It was aiming to be the New Yorker of the tech crowd. By contrast, our ambitions for OEM seemed provincial.

As one commentator later wrote, Wired “was almost immediately considered an index of the zeitgeist of the 1990s.”

I felt humbled, jealous and deflated. Just as I was gearing up for the big time in tech reporting, a giant’s shadow whooshed passed me.

Still, I had work to do. Too much of it.

Seeing I was over my head, Weitzner granted me a gift. His old college buddy, an EE Times reporter, would become OEM’s managing editor.

David Lieberman was an extra set of hands on the keyboard, an additional voice cajoling reporters and columnists to join the cause, and fresh eyes proofing the final copy and pages. Perhaps most important -- and I suspect Weitzner, who had nicknamed him Liebling, grokked this – David was a calm oar in the water to complement my style of frenetic and sometimes sloppy paddling.

One former publisher said Lieberman looked like a homeless guy with his shoulder-length hair and perpetual three-day beard. A more accurate description would compare him to an English professor, more in love with poetry than impressing the faculty chair.

Lieberman was a self-described “medievalist” at Stonybrook when he met Weitzner. A college mentor had turned him on to the field. It suited a young man who dove into close readings of the Torah in Hebrew when he attended an orthodox Jewish school.

There weren’t many good jobs in medieval studies, so Lieberman became a college writing teacher.  “But I was lazy in grad school, I couldn’t figure out a dissertation topic, so I never did one, and eventually the grad-school money ran out,” he told me later.

Like me, Lieberman fell into tech. A tech trade magazine who needed a copy editor snapped him up and, later, offered him better pay to be a tech reporter.

“I had no knowledge of anything technical, so they slotted me into what seemed like unimportant areas – computers, peripherals and displays. I took it seriously and went in depth. Maybe it was the Hebrew school thing, you dig down deep,” he said.

And dig he did. By the time Lieberman got to EE Times, he was arguably the best reporter you could find on the technologies inside displays. In those days they mainly used fat cathode-ray tubes and visionaries were talking up an emerging class of svelte flat-panel displays. Lieberman followed the people and companies behind a half dozen arcane rival technologies that competed before LCDs won the battle as the flat panel of choice in millions of TVs, laptops and smartphones.

“I loved the esoteric display community,” he said. “The way I learned was to talk to experts, admit I didn’t know shit and ask all the basic questions.”

Lieberman worked from home in Massachusetts. Every couple of weeks, he’d send in a packet of elaborate hand-drawn sketches for art to illustrate stories he wrote or edited. Knowing he was a heavy smoker, I’d open the manila envelopes expecting a puff of smoke. The contents looked like they came from an ancient scribe and smelled of cigarettes. No one put more care into crafting artwork.

Once a month, he’d trek down to the office to join me and the crew as we put one issue to bed and worked up ideas for the next one.  We didn’t socialize outside of work. In those days, I didn’t have much of a social life beyond taking my kids to parks on the weekend. But we spent many late Thursday nights – the newspaper’s deadline – working together on magazine and newspaper pages until 9 or 10 p.m., munching pizza with the production crew.

“We did some good work,” Lieberman said recently of our time on OEM.

Tim Moran would probably give a more mixed review. He was the irritable traffic cop at EE Times.  Whenever anyone wanted anything out of the ordinary -- a supplement, a special report, a gatefold cover, a new department -- they had to go through Moran. He’d determine where and when it would run and how it would look. A twitch of his moustache signaled irritation. When he combed back his over-the-collar black hair with his hands, he was like a dog shaking off the stress of a skirmish.  

Suiting his role as gatekeeper, Moran’s office was next to Wallace’s. Moran served as the interface between what the editors and salespeople wanted to do and what the production and art departments could do. And he wouldn’t hesitate to tell any of them with Long Island inflected frankness what wouldn’t fly. You could argue with Moran, but you rarely won.

His greatest skill was packaging. You’d explain to him the gory details of an article and he’d come up with a punchy headline and an idea for visual art that captured it.

Once a month, I’d sit down with Moran and go over stories for the next magazine. We’d work up a dozen art ideas that I’d get our talented but mercurial art director, Mira Ramji-Stein, to design or commission. If he couldn’t recall the name of some artist perfect for a certain concept he’d just yell, “Miraaaa!” to summon her from three offices down the hall.

Lieberman, who sometimes sat in on the meetings, said they were one of his favorite parts of working on the magazine. He had a keen appreciation for Moran’s skeptical outlook and sardonic wit.

For me, these sessions were more like my half-dreaded encounters with Weitzner. I welcomed the attention of a sharp mind, but I feared the inevitable moments when I could feel the guillotine of Moran’s judgement about to come down on my rambling explanation of some misbegotten article. Heaven forbid it was my best candidate for the next cover!

Often as not, Moran would help dress up a Cinderella story for the prince’s ball. Once I had a cover story on wearable computers, a cool concept but well ahead of its time given the heavy, bulky gadgets of the day. Moran’s headline: The Prêt-à-Porter PC. After it went to press, we discovered one of the French accent marks was missing. So much for our sophistication.

Moran observed the industry from the bleacher seats of his Manhasset office. As far as I recall, he never wrote a story or an opinion piece for EE Times, though he copyedited and wrote headlines for oodles of them. He wasn’t a content guy. He let press releases pile up on a file cabinet behind his desk. Then he’d throw them away every six weeks or so without reading them.

Next: A Cast of Characters