Michael S. Malone

Michael Shawn Malone (born January 21, 1954) is an American author, columnist, editor, investor, businessman, and television producer and has been the host of several shows on PBS. Currently (2009), Malone is a columnist for ABC News, an op-ed contributor for The Wall Street Journal, a contributing editor to Wired, and the editor-in-chief of Edgelings.com, a website focused on business and technology news in Silicon Valley.

Malone is the author of numerous books and has written the "Silicon Insider" column for ABC since 2000. In his professional writing, he usually uses the name Michael S. Malone to distinguish his work from that of another U.S. author named Michael Malone, primarily a fiction writer.

Malone was born in 1954 in Fürstenfeldbruck in Bavaria, a state in what was then West Germany. His father was a dyslexic U.S. Air Force officer who later worked as a freelance writer. After living in Munich for a time, he grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1975 and received his MBA from SCU in 1977.

Malone worked in public relations for Hewlett-Packard Co. before joining the San Jose Mercury News in 1979. In 1980, he joined the San Jose Mercury News and became one of the nation's first daily high-tech reporters. For his work breaking stories on toxic waste, drugs, sweatshops, and espionage, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice. Still, he quickly left The Mercury News in 1981 and became a freelancer. 

Malone's work appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes ASAP, Upside Magazine, Fast Company, The New York Times, and others under various roles between 1981 and 2001. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is a former editor of Forbes ASAP and has contributed to Upside and Fast Company magazines. He was also the host of Malone, an interview series on KTEH, the PBS station in San Jose, California. In 2000 he became the "Silicon Insider" columnist for the ABC News website.

Malone is the author of 15 books covering the world of business and technology, including Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane (ISBN 0-385-48684-7), The Big Score, The Virtual Corporation and Intellectual Capital, Going Public, Virtual Selling, and One Digital Day. "Going Public" featured Joseph DiNucci.

Of his work for ABC, Malone has written that "Over the near-decade, I've had this job, I've probably written five columns that drew major national attention: calling for Dan Rather's firing, declaring the decline of Microsoft, predicting the death of newspapers, naming Matt Drudge the most influential journalist in America and" (alleging liberal) "media bias in the recent" (2008) "presidential election."

In 2004, he was named a Distinguished Friend of Oxford University. Malone produced the four-episode/four-hour PBS miniseries The New Heroes (2005) with colleague Bob Grove and executive producer David Davis. He also authored liner notes for the accompanying soundtrack CD. Hosted by Robert Redford, "The New Heroes" was about social entrepreneurship. The series, which aired in primetime, was nominated for an Emmy (27th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards) in the category of "Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Cinematography" but did not win.