Tom Abate

Tom Abate was born in Brooklyn in 1954, the oldest of six children in a family of Italian and Greek descent. He attended St. Edmund’s Elementary School and Regis High School before entering New York University in 1972. He dropped out of college after a year and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1974.

Tom got his first exposure to print and broadcast journalism at the Defense Information School, the training institute for the Armed Forces Network. For three years he ran a closed-circuit radio and television station aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific. Discharged in 1978 as a petty officer second class, Tom entered UC Berkeley and starting writing for the campus paper, the Daily Californian. In 1979 he was elected editor-in-chief. The paper was on the verge of bankruptcy. Tom helped lead the financial turnaround and broke a story about the H-bomb that put the paper in the national spotlight.

Tom graduated Berkeley summa cum laude in 1980 with a major in political science and a minor in Mandarin. He married his college sweetheart, Mia Ousley, in a big fat Greek wedding in Sacramento. They sought their fortunes in the Northern California town of Eureka where they narrowly averted disaster when Tom partnered with a bogus newspaper publisher. (I tell that tale in a blog posting titled: “The time I bought half-interest in a newspaper from a man with wooden teeth”) They bounced back and started a typesetting business, and created a national mail order business setting type for small press book publishers.

In 1989, Tom took another run at publishing by launching an alternative paper, the North Coast Journal. It continues in publication in Arcata, California, under a new owner. Tom sold the paper and moved his family back to New York City to attend the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He earned his Master’s degree in 1991 and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.

In 1992 Tom became the Silicon Valley reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1997 he moved next door to the San Francisco Chronicle to cover biotechnology. He is the author of “The Biotech Investor” published by Times Books. Tom covered economics for the Chronicle during the 2004 presidential race. In 2006 he returned to the Silicon Valley beat to cover innovation.

Tom and Mia have two sons, Julius, 19, and Aeneas, 15, and a daughter, AnaSofia, 4. They now live in San Leandro, California. In 2004 the family built a new house on the Humboldt County homestead that is a legacy of their business days.

In 2005 Tom started blogging at MiniMediaGuy.org, where he draws on his life experience, reportorial skills and Silicon Valley insights to think out loud about the business, technology and culture of media.