Understanding the audience is the first step for addressing any communications challenge.

Writing Portfolio

Feature articles

Inside the world of competitive crossword puzzles. Vicious, yes, but it's not just the bloodsport they make it out to be on TV. Read all about it in this feature article for the San Francisco Chronicle.

I wrote this profile of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak for UC Berkeley when they named him Alumnus of the Year for 2015. As a bookend to that piece, here's a column I wrote in 1993 when I was editor-in-chief of MacUser magazine, contemplating Steve Jobs' possible return to Apple. (Here's one more column, daydreaming about something that would eventually become Siri on what would eventually become the iPhone.)

I have hundreds of features, columns, reviews, and news stories from the print era -- someday I'll scan and post more of them, but for now you can feel free to explore the boxes in my garage. All of the magazine and online material I've written and edited add up to about 200 full-length books (maybe not Stephen King-length epics, but books nonetheless hefty enough to make you wish you'd bought the Kindle version).

Social media

While I was at the Sierra Club, I created an intranet and extranet for the organization's 20,000 volunteers, revamped the network of 200+ websites, launched email newsletters for activism, member-acquisition, and fundraising, oversaw the 1-million-circulation member magazine and Emmy-winning TV production groups, and occasionally ghostwrote blog posts like this one,

If you'd like to see some of the hundreds of blog posts I wrote when I ran online communications at Palm, I had them printed into a book that I'd be happy to show you.

In the first year after launching @palm, Twitter named it to its list of the 50 most influential channels -- the only product-oriented channel on the list (most being related to cataclysmic geopolitical events or Kardashians).We had practically zero market share, but we had rabidly loyal fans. I leveraged that audience to sustain visibility for the company and its products, by doing things like rallying our supporters to get us to the top of opinion polls about the best phone or mobile OS in the market.

White papers and beyond

Most of my more-recent consulting projects have been for internal audiences or are otherwise confidential in nature. As a result, I can't make them available on a public site; however, I'm happy to share samples offline (email or call me).

These projects have included blog posts and white papers for VC firms, preparing sustainable development reports and presentations for Fortune 500 companies, and editing a groundbreaking book on the history of Star Trek (the original series, natch). (And yes, there still is ground to be broken in the history of Star Trek....)

Here's an unpublished tech industry "think piece" for your reading pleasure.

I've interviewed and edited various celebrities and literary luminaries, including Douglas Adams, John Cleese, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, and James Burke. (I've also fired a couple of them -- ask for details.)