Tricia Duryee, a resourceful and enterprising technology journalist who reported on some of the biggest names in the business in her hometown of Seattle and beyond, died Aug. 30 after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 46 years old.
A graduate of Seattle’s Garfield High School and the University of Oregon journalism program, Duryee covered the rise of wireless technologies, smartphones, and e-commerce, as well as gaming and venture capital as a reporter for publications including The Seattle Times, AllThingsD, MocoNews.net and GeekWire.
“Tricia was a sunny and bright personality in the often drab world of tech reporting,” said entrepreneur and podcast host Kara Swisher, the AllThingsD and Recode co-founder. “Always enthusiastic and perpetually curious, she was always looking for new ways to tell stories on her beat and bring alive an era of innovation for readers. What a terrible loss for her family but also the larger journalism community.”
As a Seattle Times reporter from 2000 to 2008, Duryee helped to usher in an era of fast-paced online business and tech reporting as the driving force behind the newspaper’s Tech Tracks blog, while also reporting major stories for the paper.
“Tricia genuinely enjoyed her job; she simply loved being a reporter,” recalled Mark Watanabe, who was The Seattle Times’ technology editor at the time.
“She loved digging up stories about technology at a time when the field was exploding and becoming an integral part of the economy,” Watanabe said. “She liked competing for stories and honing her reporting skills, developing a beat, and engaging the numerous people populating the field. Her Rolodex was overflowing.”
Duryee was a GeekWire staff writer for two years starting in 2014, at a critical juncture in the evolution of the GeekWire newsroom. She infused her reporting with deep institutional knowledge of mobile technologies and e-commerce, including Amazon’s competition with Walmart, eBay, and Jet.com.
In interviews with business and technology leaders — ranging from startup CEOs to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — she had a knack for putting people at ease and getting them to tell her more than they planned.
She served as a moderator at the GeekWire Summit, and embraced GeekWire’s tradition of experiential journalism, including a widely read story about using Apple’s “Find My Phone” feature to track down her husband’s lost phone, which turned into an inadvertent run-in with the apparent thief.
Family members believe Duryee extended her life significantly by applying to her treatment the same determined approach she brought to her work as a reporter — researching drugs and clinical trials, establishing strong relationships with providers and other patients, and politely but firmly pressing her doctors to do more.
“Tricia pushed them a lot, and was a great self-advocate, and would have sources to back up what she thought she should do,” explained her husband, Patrick McCarthy, a software engineer for Expedia.
She poured her heart into her role as a mom to two young boys, Dylan, now 11, and Colin, 9. After moving to Austin with her family in 2016, she established strong connections with other parents in the community, organized gatherings and parties, and served as a room parent every year despite her struggle with cancer.
“Who does that? If anything, you use the cancer diagnosis to say, ‘I don’t have to be the room parent,'” said her sister, Tracy Bech. “But she showed up for them in every single way that she could.”
Tricia Marie Duryee was born Dec. 16, 1977, to David and Anne Duryee, who had met when they were the lending officer and branch manager, respectively, at a bank. She grew up in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
“She was always very observant. She was always listening,” said Jen Haller, Duryee’s cousin, now a partner and chief of staff at Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend. Haller grew up in nearby Kenmore, Wash., and would spend weeks at a time living with Tricia and Tracy during the summers when they were growing up.
Strength, curiosity, and a sharp wit were hallmarks of her personality, Haller said.
School didn’t come easy to her as a kid, but she persisted and overcame challenges, recalled Bech, her sister.
“She would develop habits and what I ultimately think were skills underneath it all, to just be a really good student, and a really determined person in what she did,” Bech said. “She was used to meeting up with obstacles and getting through them.”
Her love of journalism began at Garfield, where she wrote for the school paper, The Messenger. She embraced the cultural diversity of the school and developed a love for 1990s hip-hop that endured throughout her life.
Later, when she interviewed fellow Garfield alum and renowned music producer Quincy Jones for The Seattle Times, they engaged in a friendly debate over the business acumen of Snoop Dogg. Duryee was a big fan of the rapper, and as Jones warmed to her argument, he declared that she and Snoop would really get along, her sister recalled.
Duryee’s strength and determination came through when it came time for college. Her dad — who went on to become a business consultant and the co-author, with her sister, of the book, “60 Minute CFO” — is a University of Washington alum who hoped that both his daughters would attend his alma mater, as well.
However, as a budding reporter at the time, Duryee was drawn to the University of Oregon for its well-regarded journalism program. So she decided to buck the family tradition. Her reasoning won the support of her dad, who ultimately accepted the reality of having an Oregon Duck in the family.
She interned every summer during college, reporting for newspapers including The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., The Chronicle in Centralia, Wash., and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
One especially formative story was the May 1998 school shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., which Duryee covered as a student journalist for The Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon. Her photos and reporting ran in publications nationally. Covering the incident, in which two students were killed and 25 others wounded, deeply influenced Duryee’s compassion for kids and her approach to parenting, said McCarthy, her husband.
She and McCarthy initially met at a party in 2006, when she was a reporter for the Seattle Times. When he tried to chat her up by asking about her job, she told him to read the paper the next day to find out. Sure enough, the following morning, there was her byline on a big A1 spread about the rollout of 3G wireless technologies.
“That always cracked me up,” McCarthy said. “I think she was trying to get me to go away.”
It didn’t work. They ran into each other again about six months later, started dating, and married in 2010.
One highlight from Duryee’s tenure at The Seattle Times was a 2006 trip to cover Nokia in Finland, recalled Watanabe, the former Seattle Times technology editor. Her reporting on the culture around wireless data and mobile technologies in the country foreshadowed the revolution that would soon take over the world.
Duryee was unusual among reporters for her understanding of corporate finance and willingness to dig into numbers, Watanabe said. It may have been an inherited trait. Watanabe recalled Duryee setting up a seminar in which her dad helped Seattle Times reporters sharpen their financial journalism skills.
“Tricia was crucial member of Seattle Times technology coverage and the larger newspaper. Her subsequent jobs extended her impact to a broader national level,” Watanabe said. “She was hard-working, smart, fearless, and kind. Her colleagues liked her and liked working with her. She was always ready to take on the next story or, using her considerable skills, dig it up.”
The profession, he said, “has suffered a great loss. She will be missed.”
A service and celebration of life will be held starting at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 29, at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, in Austin, Texas, which was one of her favorite places to visit with her family. A gathering is also planned for Seattle next summer, date and location to be determined.
Update, January 2025: A celebration of life will be held at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025, at Seattle’s Mount Baker Community Club. More information here.
Duryee is survived by her husband, Patrick McCarthy; her children, Dylan and Colin McCarthy; her parents, David and Anne Duryee; her sister, Tracy Bech (Tyler), and her niece and nephews.
In lieu of flowers, her family suggests donations to organizations including Casting for Recovery, Wonders and Worries, Inheritance of Hope, Little Pink Houses of Hope, Breast Cancer Resource Center (Austin), and Camp Kesem.
