You’ve got a story. I can help you find it, refine it, and tell it to the world.
A writer, editor, communications strategist, and story coach, I have a deep background in technology journalism (including leadership roles at WIRED and VentureBeat) and a long track record of uncovering, defining, and telling stories for individuals and brands.
My clients have included Samsung, MailChimp, Trello, HackerOne, Upwork, DemandBase, Korn Ferry, and PWC.
I work with tech startups that want to refine their messaging to reach a national audience – and with later-stage tech companies that are ready to scale their content production.
I also work 1:1 with entrepreneurs to find their authentic stories and tell them to the world.
My story
I discovered the thrill of publishing early, when Cricket magazine published one of my cartoons and awarded it first prize among 9- to 12-year-olds. Other kids got sugar highs from too much ice cream. I got a publishing high from Cricket that has lasted a lifetime.
I followed that up by writing annoyingly precocious letters to the editor of my hometown paper, writing and editing for my high school newspaper, and, later, contributing to college newspapers and lit magazines. After a very impractical liberal arts degree, I was lucky to land a job at a computer magazine, and I was off to the races.
Twenty-plus years as a journalist covering technology gave me a front-row seat to the PC, Internet, mobile, and social media revolutions. I contributed to a wide variety of national publications, online and in print, wrote regular weekly columns for VentureBeat, Business 2.0, and InfoWorld, and created successful, long-running podcasts in both audio and video. I spent four years as a senior editor at WIRED, then led the news team as editor-in-chief at VentureBeat for another four years. At both publications, I was lucky to work with and mentor some truly outstanding writers, reporters, and editors.
Some of what I've published: WIRED - VentureBeat - Other Publications
That work gave me the skills needed to explain complex technological and scientific issues to general audiences. And it taught me how to find and tell stories.
This work also taught me to mentor writers, manage teams, and ship copy the way Agile dev teams ship software. When I was running it, VentureBeat regularly published 30-50 stories every weekday.
What I do
Since 2015, I’ve been applying my journalistic skills to define and refine corporate messages, establish thought leadership, and help executives tell their stories.
My work covers a broad range of tech companies, with a particular focus on B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, and health tech.
At Tweney Media, I work with companies and entrepreneurs to develop their stories, create leadership-defining content in a variety of media, craft winning pitches, and deploy those stories in earned, owned, and social channels.
I also help organizations learn how to produce, edit, and publish copy at high volume, under deadline pressure, day after day.
Previously, as Valimail’s VP of communications, I defined the communications and content strategy and led the PR, analyst relations, research, and content initiatives. I built an agile content development process, using JIRA, for marketing content, created the company’s blog (and published over 200 posts to it), and established a respected research program that generated hundreds of items of media coverage, from outlets including Vox Media, Fox News, CNBC, the Washington Post, Axios, and Politico.
At Highwire PR, I built a small but mighty editorial team that delivered hundreds of items of content annually: bylines, blog posts, LinkedIn articles, press releases, and more. I led cross-functional project teams creating high-impact messaging frameworks and research reports. I also worked closely with account leads on building out PR/storytelling strategies for top-tier enterprise tech, cybersecurity, and health-tech clients. The work we did created tens of millions of dollars in sales pipeline and led to hundreds of items of news coverage.
See LinkedIn for more of my work history.
I’m also the founder of tinywords, a daily journal of haiku and micropoetry, which I’ve been publishing since 2000. With over 3,000 subscribers, it’s the world’s largest English-language publication devoted to haiku.
I’ve been blogging since the last millennium (my first post, on Blogger, was in November 1999), mostly about tech and media but more recently about mindfulness, swimming, running, and writing. I write morning pages pretty much every day.
When I’m not working, I’m probably out swimming in the nearest body of water.
