About
Welcome to my Web space. I was a reporter from September 2003 until August 2009, when I left the industry to gain a deeper understanding of business and to try something new. Thanks to my insatiable curiosity and shifting economic forces, by age 28, I started my third career.
In my most recent reporting job, I covered Seattle companies large and small, including Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom and Amazon.com, for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. My beat included the journalism industry itself, which gave me a unique perspective on the business of my own profession. I also briefly reported for seattlepi.com, which represented the largest major metropolitan daily newspaper to transition to online-only.
My biggest contribution to the new online operation was a recommendation to Hearst Corp. management that an aerospace blog about Boeing be preserved and expanded. My instincts were right: In my first month as aerospace reporter for that blog, it received more than 900,000 page views and set a staff blog record.
I’m a native of New Jersey, though moving around the country has lost me my accent. Get me around Jersey people though, and it comes right back. I started my career as a bona fide computer nerd. I majored in computer information systems at American University in Washington, D.C., and for three years, I worked as a data analyst and Web designer at FDIC to put myself through school. I also minored in physics because it was fun to learn about how the world works, from quarks to supernovae.
When I began writing for The Eagle, the student newspaper at American, I became addicted to meeting new people and getting scoops. Post-graduation, I turned down a lucrative federal government IT job to pursue a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University, near Chicago.
By the time I graduated the masters program in spring of 2005, I had written for the weekly Washington Business Journal; Bloomberg News in London, where I cut my chops reporting on London Stock Exchange businesses; and Religion News Service in Washington, D.C., where I covered the influence of religion on politics, among other things.
And then I decided that the most romantic and adventurous career path would need to start with a daily newspaper.
I packed my bags and moved to Alabama. My first daily newspaper job was at the Mobile Press-Register on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where I reported on business and survived two hurricanes, including Katrina in August 2005. Living in the Deep South helped me to better understand and appreciate America’s political and cultural vastness, and to this day I carry an affection for the beautiful side of Southern culture.
Next, I moved to Seattle to report on business for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Much to my surprise, I fell in love with Seattle so deeply that living here replaced “staying in journalism” as a life priority.
To recap: I’ve lived in two New Jersey suburbs, one of New York and one of Philadelphia, in Washington, D.C., in Evanston, Il., near Chicago, in London, in Arlington, Va., in Mobile, Ala., in Minneapolis and in Seattle.
I’ve chosen Seattle for my home because it mixes city and nature, commerce and creation, the energy of skyscrapers with the peace of evergreens, water and mountains.
I enjoy hiking and skiing and exploring new places, trying new foods and clumsily attempting new endeavors. In 2001, I appeared on “Wheel of Fortune” and won an all-expenses-paid trip to Antigua, which I still claim is one of my biggest achievements.
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