Former Farmington newspaper owner and publisher Eliot O’Brien was known for making his opinions and his born-again Christian faith known through the daily news.
O’Brien, 63, died Saturday at his home in Farmington.
Although O’Brien’s evangelical approach to operating The Daily Times in Farmington drew criticism — and lawsuits — he was committed to local newsgathering until he sold the newspaper in 1998 to MediaNews Group.
“Some of (the criticism) was they just didn’t quite understand where he was coming from,” said O’Brien’s daughter, Rhiannon Taylor. “People just didn’t understand my dad. My dad was very opinionated and very outspoken.”
O’Brien loved the work of putting out a daily newspaper, a job he inherited from his father, Lincoln, in the early 1980s, Taylor said. When he sold the paper in 1998, he began working as a pastor and missionary and helped establish the Farmington church City of Refuge House of Prayer.
“He didn’t care about what people thought. He didn’t keep quiet,” Taylor said.
Employees who worked for O’Brien remember him as a publisher who invested a lot of money in the newspaper to ensure it could effectively serve the Four Corners community. Employees were well paid for the work they did and were treated like part of a family rather than a corporation, said former editor and writer Dorothy Nobis.
“He was somewhat eccentric, however, eccentricity doesn’t always equal bad,” Nobis said. “… For the most part, his employees came first.”
O’Brien’s investment in local news was realized only after the paper was restructured to fit the corporate model of MediaNews Group, which laid off dozens of employees soon after the acquisition, former editor Cindy Cowan said.
But his religious focus while operating The Daily Times drew concern from some. O’Brien integrated his faith into the paper by including regular features on residents who had their lives changed by religion, exchanging horoscope predictions with scriptural quotes and in some cases cutting news articles that highlighted beliefs out of line with his own, employees recalled.
O’Brien was also accused of hiring and firing employees based on their religion. Some of those claims led to lawsuits, at least one of which was settled out of court, according to federal court records.
“Whether you agreed with him and his beliefs or not, he had very strong convictions and he walked and talked it,” Cowan said. “He always stood by what he believed in. Whether you liked him or not, you had to admire him for standing by his gumption. It was his paper.”
— This article appeared on page C3 of the Albuquerque Journal
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