I was a 20-year-old journalism and business student in 1991 when I placed my first ad as a writer/editor — a black and white flyer made on a cheap copier in the student union building. I posted them around local campuses that fall, offering services like tutoring in English and creative writing, thesis editing for grad students and syllabus-writing for professors.
I got a few bites back then, but like most budding creatives I suffered the necessary injustice of supplementing my art* with a clerk’s job in the college admissions office. Luckily they recognized a good deal when they saw it, and for a clerk’s salary they got someone to rewrite file purge policies, re-configure student forms and write course catalog copy.
That was more than 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve worked as both staffer and freelancer on editorial, advertising, trade, business, technical, policy, consulting and communications training projects.
Some highlights:
I redeveloped internal print and software forms for a Santa Fe health care company to improve data quality and participation among employees. The change resulted in less confusion about scheduled shifts, faster traffic reports and troubleshooting, and lots of saved frustration among schedulers.
After reputation damages under prior management at a large, Reno-area non-profit, I worked closely with program staff to develop micro-PR campaigns that helped repair relations between the organization and the community. Support was renewed, and the branch went on to win fundraising awards the following year.
On tight press schedules I produced an average of 12-15 feature-length medical, real estate and building-industry leader profiles each month, over a period of 18 months, for a national network of independent trade magazine publishers. Despite the short turnaround time - about 10 days from assignment to press - publishers consistently received kudos from readers and advertisers on editorial quality.
When the idea for an alternative newsweekly surfaced in Colorado’s poorest region, I developed written sales materials to generate buzz and gauge community interest, resulting in pre-launch sales before sales staff ever hit the streets. After launch, I produced, assigned and edited colorful local stories that quickly won the paper affection among thousands of readers across south central Colorado.
In 2000, before the term “blog” hit mainstream vernacular, I launched and quickly grew the readership of a casual travel and adventure blog from 24 readers/month at launch to more than 14,000/month in the first year. Eight years later, adventurejournalist.com still enjoys a loyal readership and outstanding search engine positioning, and Technorati ranks it in the top 1% of the 50 million blogs and web sites it tracks daily.
From content development for tourism agencies to story acquisition for corporate intranets to rewriting 20-year-old employee manuals, my experience has ranged the full spectrum of web and print. Are you ready to explore what we can do together?
* Not really. Even way back then writing and communications were, for me, much more about language roots and behavioral/cognitive science and just plain good business than they were art. A short literary and poetic period sometime around the turn of the century aside, not much has changed.