Dan Baum, journalist and author dies at age 64

Dan Baum had been a successf ul f reelance writer and author for 17 years when he landed a staff writing job at The New Yorker magazine. He called it “the ne plus ultra of journalism gigs.”

Baum wa s i n it ia l ly elated and praised for his work, but things soured, and he was fired. In sharing his side of the story, though, he turned not to his customary outlet, a magazine, but to a fledgling online platform called Twitter.

Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.

The media world, which always paid close- attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)

Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.

He died Oct. 8 at his home in Boulder, Colorado, at 64. His wife and writing partner, Margaret L. Knox, said the cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

Baum led an itinerant life, traveling the world, and was bitten early by the writing bug. He reported for several newspapers, including T he Wall Street Journal, wrote countless articles for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, Playboy and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and produced four well-regarded books of nonfiction.

His most a cclaimed was “Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans” (2009). He had embedded himself in the city after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 and wrote a nearconstant stream of articles and, later, blog posts, for The New Yorker, chronicling the devastation and harrowing human tragedies as well as the triumphs.

Captivated by the city, he stayed on and began writing the book. It covered four decades of New Orleans history, from Hurricane Betsy in 1965 to Katrina, and tracked the city ’s changes through the lives of nine characters, among them a cop, a transsexual barkeep and a trumpet-playing gynecologist who became a coroner.

In his review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote that he had been skeptical when he first picked up the book but that “by the final third of ‘ Nine Lives,’ as the water begins pouring into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was weeping like an idiot.”

It was around this time in 2009, a couple of years after being fired by The New Yorker, that Baum took to Twitter to recount that experience. He concluded that he had failed to grasp the magazine’s culture and had overstepped his bounds.

His many new followers on Twitter were riveted — less, it seemed, by his airing of the magazine’s inner workings than by how he was reimagining Twitter.

“This is sort of a watershed moment for Twitter, and storytelling in general, isn’t it?” Brett Michael Dykes wrote on Gawker. “I mean, here’s a guy, a widely respected writer, using Twitter’s 140 character ‘ tweets’ to weave a bit of an epic story.”

“I certainly can’t recall anything else of the sort happening prev iously,” Dykes added..

In addition to his wife, Baum is survived by a daughter, Rosa Baum, his father and a brother, Andrew. Another brother, Michael, died in 1985.